Ever get discouraged?

[GinaC]

I get discouraged when a contractor doesn't want to work for me because I don't have a grand plan for him to come redo the house in one fell swoop.

I am thankful for my electrician and my plumber, who have no problems coming over to discuss the latest thing that I've finally decided on. Those other contractors are shooting themselves in the foot, because I don't mind paying for extra service calls instead of rushing forward and making bad design decisions.

[mjt]

The part about schedule and deadlines seems to be right on point and has been a big sticking point for us. Funding has been another. He wants everything to be done as fast as possible ...

I respectfully suggest he needs to temper his desire to get everything "done" as quickly as possible. A house, especially an old one, is never "done".

And part of the fun is the journey. Given unlimited funds we could just hire a designer and an architect and have them do everything we wanted. But then we wouldn't have the fun and the resulting stories that are behind each project and each object we acquired along the way. (Some friends of ours recently bought a fully furnished place. It's beautiful, but it has no soul. You can tell it was furnished by the previous owners' designer, not by owners who thoughtfully collected objects that spoke to them.)

Because I would love that we could have time to live too.

Bingo! Your house isn't your life; but it is where you live. If it becomes your life or gets in the way of your life, then you have a problem.

[mjt]

I get discouraged when a contractor doesn't want to work for me because I don't have a grand plan for him to come redo the house in one fell swoop.

I am thankful for my electrician and my plumber, who have no problems coming over to discuss the latest thing that I've finally decided on. Those other contractors are shooting themselves in the foot, because I don't mind paying for extra service calls instead of rushing forward and making bad design decisions.

Similar experience here. It took us a while to find a contractor and subs that we could work with. It was obvious that we had a lot of work that would stretch over many years. Why they wanted to avoid relationships and be so transactional was a puzzle to me.

There were times where we kept the general contractor and some of the subs in business when times were lean, they had holes in their schedule, or, in the case of late spring blizzards and the mason, interior work that they could do for us instead of sitting idle or freezing their butts off.

Because we weren't trying to get it all done at once, we could be agile when a contractor called us up and said "Can I do project X for you, now? Another project has stalled and I have some free time..."