Dan, the Contractor

I mentioned to my boss that we wanted to get some things done around the house and asked if he knew of anyone that he could recommend. It was the best move I could have made. He immediately gave me Dan's name. Dan is a contractor and owns RHD Development. He also attends the church that I work for. My boss also gave me the names of a great painter and a guy that does excellent sheetrock work. We talked for about a half hour, with me telling him what we were thinking of doing and him giving me pointers. It was the best half hour I ever spent.

Once the refinance money was safety in my account, I felt ready to give Dan a call. I left him a message on his cell phone and in a very short time he gave me a call back. We set up an appointment for him to come by the house the next Friday.

On Friday, Dan arrived right on time and we went through the house showing him everything we wanted down. He would come up with a bid and then we would decide how much we could afford to get done.

The two items that are most important are replacing the roof and the main bathroom. During the big wind storm a few years ago, we lost a lot of shingles off the house. I had someone come out and replace the missing shingles, but I knew that was only a temporary measure and that eventually I would have to replace the entire roof. Since there were already two layers up there, I knew this time I would have to have the existing layers torn off first.

The main bathroom really needs work. There is water damage to the floor from either the toilet or the shower. The kitchen is on the other side of the wall and you can tell there's something going on under the flooring because it's very spongy along the wall.

Other things on our wish list are to update the kitchen, remove the air conditioner unit that was in the wall underneath the family room window, remove the ceiling fan in the living room, install a light fixture in the hallway, and replace the windows with energy efficient ones.

After about a week, we met with Dan again to go over the bid proposal. His bid was very reasonable with the bid for the windows coming in at least 40% less than the other two bids we received. We totaled things up and decided that we could get everything on our list done, which was way more than we were expecting.

We are both so excited to get started. It really seems like a dream at this point.