Managing your home improvements

Monday, May 19th, 2008

One of the bigger challenges I have found in doing home improvements is when we’ve had to call in professionals to sort something out.  If we hadn’t had the problem before or didn’t like the last electrician or plumber or whatever, we were starting from square one. 

And so went the process of calling a bunch of companies from the phone book, getting one call back (or two, if we were particularly lucky!) and hiring them because we had no choice.  Sometimes we’d get a referral from a friend or another trusted professional.  Sometimes this worked, but usually the referral never called back or did shoddy work and then we felt bad about telling the referrer.

 Enter www.servicemagic.com.  It is a referral service for all sorts of home improvement contractors, from handymen to roofers, plumbers, you name it.  You log on to the site and you tell them what service you are looking for, how large the project, and how soon you want it completed.  You enter your contact info, and boom! you are given the names and info of 3 professionals in your area.  And guess what?  These people actually call you!  They actually come out for estimates!  And they are actually nice! And the whole process is free!

The way it works is this: the contractor pay to be a part of the service as well as for each referral they receive (unlike with Angie’s List where you pay for membership).  So that is a good incentive for them to contact you.  You have no obligation to use their services, but since they are paying for the referral, you want to use www.servicemagic.com if you are seriously considering a repair or upgrade, not just to price a “someday” project.

www.servicemagic.com has a price estimator for those  “someday” projects that is quite specific and based on zip code, which is great as the cost of labor and materials can vary widely across the U.S.

We have found some great home improvement people for around our house through www.servicemagic.com and hopefully you will too!

Copyright 2008-2009 Kristin Delfau, author of Turbo-Mom's Guide to Saving Money Without Wasting Time a womens' personal finance book, and Aji Publishing.

Tags: home improvement, top 10
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