Tame Your Contractor - Newly Published Book Gives Consumers Power When Hiring and Managing a Home Improvement Contractor.

Unveils the inner workings of the contractor game. Combines powerful insights into the contractor psyche with keen logic and common sense approaches consumers can take to protect themselves. Comprehensive and fascinating reading. Ten chapters; 162 pages. Soft cover.

(PRWEB) April 4, 2004 --This book teaches consumers how to survive a home improvement project using a contractor. Indeed, by revealing the tips, tricks, and strategies most often plied against consumers, the homeowners reading this book will learn to get the project they desire at the quality they deserve and at a fair and honest price. Sound impossible? Not according to this author, and he has the background and expertise to stand on.

This may be the most comprehensive treatment of the subject ever written. Authored by an experienced home-improvement contractor with commercial and governmental contracting background and a Masters Degree in Public Administration, the writer demonstrates the "cushy" world of the modern home improvement contractor as compared to the stringent demands placed on commercial and government contractors. No wonder consumers are so easily gouged in the home improvement marketplace.

But common sense practices easily transpose from the commercial to the residential contracting world. A homeowner with this book becomes inoculated against contractor shenanigans, such as inflated bids, charges for "extras," and cash payments in advance.

In particular the book demolishes this later notion. The belief that homeowners should pay upfront cash deposits to contractors is the NUMBER ONE cause of homeowner/contractor problems, according to the author. His argument is compelling. This may be the most important lesson that consumers (and modern "advice" gurus) can learn. The chapter on upfront payments dissects the practice by examining the arguments contractors use FOR getting advance deposits, then offers logical and reasonable work-arounds, so that homeowners keep their money in their own pockets without losing the contractor of their choice. Now, thats the definition of a "win-win!"

Only then, do consumers keep their natural buying power intact, instead of giving it away at the very beginning and relying on a-hope-and-a-prayer they'll receive what they've asked for.

The author goes on to describe the secrets of getting bids (and how homeowners too often influence bidding to go high). It explains how even simple plans can be powerful and precise tools, discloses the secrets of qualifying a contractor-selection, and even explains how to survive a "tiger." There is more in this book about the seething undercurrents and subtle stratagems at work when using a contractor, than you ever knew existed. By learning them in advance, and by taking a peek into the contractor psychology, the consumer will quite easily reap a far better home improvement experience.

Does that sound too good to be true? Well, according to the author it's exactly what happens, and it's easy because the world's leading experts at hiring contractors (which happens to be none other than General Contractors themselves) do this very thing when they hire and manage contractors (known as "subcontractors"). Now that's endorsement built of granite.