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Originally Posted by KonaChick
I'm not lumping you all together, just answering the forum question with my opinion. We've had extensive work done to our permanent residence and therefore have a good idea what is a reasonable price for services rendered. More often than not the quote we get for a service up at our lake home is typically much higher than what we've paid for the exact same service at our other home (which is smaller and less grandiose btw). These incidents aren't isolated to just us...it's a conversation that we've had with neighbors up at the lake and they've experienced the same thing. On the other hand it's nice to hear that not ALL people employed in the housing repair/service business are like that!!  |
I think what you maybe seeing is has less to do with a contractor showing up at a lake front retreat, and more to do with the scale and types of jobs you maybe trying to have done.
When we bought our camp and reworked it we where lucky enough to have the knowledge and skill to do most work ourselves... so we did. However one project we decided to look into contracting out was to update and move our electrical service panel. We had 3 contractor quote us prices and all where extremely high. The last contractor was a very matter of fact guy who told us, "we have more work up here then we can shake a stick at" and "there are many easier jobs then crawling under your camp to move all the wiring and routing it to the new pannel"..... moral of the story all three contractor where willing to do the work, but where going to make sure the where compansated for taking on a pain in the rear job, when they could be working in an easy to work on new construction project. So we of course dropped the contractors, found out what we had to do and did everything ourselves.....we just had to survive with out electricity a little longer then expected.....
In short Contractors in an area where there is a lot of construction going on don't like to get tied up with small or unusual projects that are going to be more aggrivation to them then anything...
Now this doesn't apply to all contractors..... but it is what I have noticed with electricians personally, and wouldn't be surprised to see the same attitude from plumbers, and construction contractors as well....