It’s hard to write this mistake post, but it should go into my mistakes folder, as it was the most directly expensive mistake of my life (as opposed to indirectly expensive, due to opportunity cost). When I remember the major decision points, my mind tends to flinch off the thought like some jumping insect.
When my family decided to move to California, we bought a large fixer-upper and paid for a lot of work. Not all of the work was done, and there were many delays the contractor did not communicate clearly about as I was waiting to give birth. We are currently talking to lawyers about what action to take about the incomplete work.
Although my spouse and I have partially merged finances and the division of money is kind of fake, the agreement was that I would pay for the renovations and he would pay for everything else. The renovations cost 85% of my non-retirement savings.
The key facts about the timeline are that we had bought a house in California in August, and I was due to give birth to my first child in March. The house needed a lot of work. The electrical system needed to be fully re-done to be up to code. Many windows were rotting. The floor was covered with old, sagging carpet. There was mold. We flew to California soon after the purchase and met with two contractors. One was moderately recommended by a friend. The other was strongly recommended by our high-touch realtor, whom we had liked working with.
The first mistake was that we only met with two contractors. To me, this was the crucial mistake. It would be insane to only interview two people to decide which one to hire for a year, if what hiring them cost that year was $250,000.
Why did I do that? (And from here I will say ‘I’, because it was my money.) On the months scale, because we wanted to choose someone and start very quickly, so we could move before I gave birth. On the weeks scale, because we were in town for only a few days or a week, and I didn’t feel like I could fit more in. I could have. But it felt stressful to fit more contractors in. I would have if I’d gotten more recommendations, but I didn’t solicit them strongly.
Why were we in town only several days? Because I wanted my husband to meet with the contractors too, and time off work was costly. We were originally in town for something else. Some kind of conference. Meeting with contractors in person was a thing we were doing in between the other things.
Both contractors seemed fine. The one our friend recommended had an accent, which I found hard to understand (and therefore found stressful), and he was more focused on getting our answers to low-level decisions that we weren’t ready to answer, having only been in the house for a brief period ourselves. The one our realtor suggested had more recommendations, and the discussion was more high-level. We didn’t find either of them easy to talk to, exactly, but the second man was a little easier. And he was willing to start earlier. How much earlier? Two weeks, maybe. After discussion, we went with the second person.
We were in a hurry. Two weeks didn’t seem like nothing, although it does now, after the renovations that we thought would take two months took six.
That was the second mistake, although it’s dwarfed by the first, and it’s hard to be high certainty that we would have liked the other contractor more. I now think a medium recommendation from someone we really trust trumps a strong recommendation from someone we don’t know that well.
The third mistake is the payment schedule.
The completion date kept crawling down the calendar. The biggest delay was permitting delays on the city’s side. I believe that this was a major source of delay. California housing bureaucracy is notoriously terrible, and there had been staffing cuts. The system was a thrashing, bloated serpent trying to starve itself as an anti-inflammatory measure. Or a body running a fever that damaged itself because it was trying to work off some greater evil.
In November, we signed a contract for weekly payments that would stretch to the end of the project timeline, which was end of January. In early January it was clear that the work wouldn’t be finished on time.
We talked about whether to suspend the payments until work resumed. We decided not to.
Why? It seemed hostile. Not showing good faith. (This is one of those parts that’s hard to write about because my mind bounces off it.) We still felt good about this contractor. Work in November and December had progressed steadily. We were emailing, making plans, choosing appliances and tile.
I entered the third trimester. Delays continued. He wasn’t updating us that often. I suspect, although I will likely never know for sure, that around this time the primary source of delay was that he deprioritized us as clients.
Work crawled forward. A month before my due date, the word from him was that completion was imminent. At the beginning I’d asked how many weeks of notice he’d have before a sure completion date, and he’d said two or three. Now he said a week. We were very anxious to be moved before I gave birth if possible. Moving while very pregnant seemed much easier than moving with a newborn. We actually made contingency plans for what would happen if I went into labor on the drive down. This never came to pass. My water broke seven weeks before he gave the green light.
The move was hectic. I went first in a plane, and took care of the two month old alone in a nearly-empty house for a few days while my partners oversaw the movers and drove the vehicles to California. As we settled in, it became increasingly clear what work hadn’t been done. Electrical work unfinished in the garage, leaving no way to charge the electric car. (In his defense, this one was remedied quickly.) Doors that didn’t latch, or close at all, because they’d been painted too thickly. Half the floor discontinuities had no shim and tripped up guests. Bits of gravel falling out of the corner of the wall in front of the nursery. A few windows not replaced, that let in street noise and winter chill.
I’m not someone who’s bothered by dysfunction in her physical environment. I tend to get used to things. Alas, these issues are not so minor I can simply decide to live with them until I die. These issues also hurt by reminding me of my carelessness and irrationality.
A few months after I realized we had made a mistake by hiring this contractor, I picked up a book on decisionmaking as one of the self help audiobooks I fall asleep to. The first chapter was on escaping false dichotomies, which was my first mistake when I zeroed in on only two options for no good reason. I had the thought: it would have saved me if, upon realizing that I was about to make a decision that would cost me most of my savings, I had decided to read a book on decisionmaking. In a way, this sounds pretty stupid. Most appropriate interventions or preparation for a big decision are more specific than that. But in this case, something that dumb and general would have helped me avoid the most expensive mistake in my life.
So that’s the fourth mistake. The meta mistake, of not noticing there was something really important to bring all my decisionmaking skills to bear on.
I was distracted by the usual number of life things. The renovations seemed like one of many things I needed to get done. If it had been a matter of whether to spend that money it would have come to the top of the priority list. But somehow, because that money was already gone in my heart (the two quotes we got were quite close to each other, so it was marked as the canonical market price in my head), the details seemed to fade to middling importance. This was just one of the many things that needed to get done. The stakes weren’t 250K, it was 250K for work that I expected (for some reason) to be similarly good.
When there’s great variability in outcome, my mind allocates more attention to it – but in this case, my mind wasn’t tracking the variability in outcome. I didn’t think that there would be $20K of work undone – or a long-term toll of resentment and embarrassment if I chose incorrectly.