Why is it so hard to find a good, reliable handman? Seeking recommendations
Hi, I have found great people to help with just about everything an old brownstone needs — except a handyman. I have one with reasonable rates and does very good work, but he’s completely unreliable. When he’s doing work for me, that’s OK — most of my projects for him aren’t urgent. But for work in our tenants apt, I really want someone to show up when we agree, and to answer the phone if not, so the tenants don’t feel put out and blame me (not that I blame them).
Any recommendations?
robertbullock
in General Discussion 4 years and 10 months ago
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stevecym | 4 years and 9 months ago
OP, i am sorry to hijack your post. i know you really need to find someone and are less concerned about they why we cannot find someone but i need to point out what happen with me here two days ago and why i would not want to be in this situation in a customer’s home:
i had to change the Moen shower valve cartridge here in my house. this is a 15 minute thing for me and that include carrying the tools up the stairs. i first went on the web and checked stock at my favorite orange apron store; they said they had 11 cartridges in stock. i got there, there were none (they are $50 each and small so they were shoplifted). i call my nearby plumbig supply and they say they have it. i run over there and they sell me an aftermarket piece for the same price as the Moen. I buy it. i install it. i test it and hear a water hammer but decide air is left in the line and close it and caulk. beautiful. i clean up and go to void the air and i still have the water hammer. not only with the shower, but the basin and bowl. my initial thought was that I did something w rong and the shower body and pipes in the wall were loose and i almost used the hammer to break into the wall next to the shower. i decided to read first and goodle “water hammer new shower cartridge moen”. it turns out that something is made different on the moen cartridge and if you use an aftermarket, you may get water hammer.
my point is, as a professional, unless a customer directs me to use a cerain product and i warn them that it might not be the best choice, something like this would be on me (if i am lucky the customer will offer to split the lost time with me; but people would be right to expect that if i charge 100 an hour, i should know). in order to know and understand when this could happen, you have to have a lot of experience and that is a lot of handyman work. and if i was not pissed off at having this happen in my own house i would be doubly annoyed if i drove around brooklyn for two hours looking for parts that either don’t exist or don’t work; this cost me 3 hours of time the other day and my wife is still wondering why the tools have not been put away.
the more stuff like this happens, the more i think i am so happy i work only on doors.
stevecym | 4 years and 9 months ago
OP, try this guy. he is a contractor and told me almost a year ago that he was taking some time off to reno his house but was keeping his business and insurance active. he often works alone wit a helper. perhaps he would not mind some small jobs. his name is Tom Staggs 646-247-3593. he is of the sort of person that if he can not do it right, he will tell you.
stevecym | 4 years and 9 months ago
cate, that is what it takes for someone who has to think of the future and protect themselves and their assests. really no way around it and someone like myself, who has a house and must carry insurance to protect the asset, i will leave the industry and do something else before putting my family at risk.
at that hourly rate, me thinks that the only benefit to a handyman is that he might change a light switch (illegal, i will not touch), a faucet, and maybe a lock all in two hours and charge someone 200 where as if you called all those trades individually, it would be closer to 500 labor.
cate | 4 years and 9 months ago
Now that you mention it, Steve, I think they did in fact charge $100 an hour. At least.
robertbullock | 4 years and 9 months ago
A handyman service like what Cate found in Queens sounds great but I don’t know of one. The handy-men and -women I’ve hired in the past have had pretty wide, and varying, skill sets and the good ones would tell me when something is beyond their abilities or comfort levels. Usually a good sign when someone’s willing to say that. That said, I am still looking for recommendations. Has anyone used the reviews on the Park Slope Parents site to find someone? Right now, that seems the most promising. I hired an appliance repair place I found there — Precision Appliance — there and had a great experience with them.
stevecym | 4 years and 9 months ago
I can say something else to this:
to run a real handyman business you need to put the manager in the field. a professional manager will be able to source information as needed to order parts and will be able to call tech people if he or she does not understand something and will be able to communicate as manager’s should. a manager will also have the confidence to look a customer in the eye and say “i am not qualified to do this” and understand that the customer will not get mad at your for saying that, they will appreciate that you said that becuase it usually means you are protecting the customer’s wallet and the safety of the customer’s family. the problem is, once people achieve the education and experience to manage like this, they often do other things because they have not figured out how to get the $100 and hour to run such a venture in NYC (that is what it takes for someone to make 40 an hour after factoring in the bs of sitting in traffice and the cost to run a business and provide the safety net including medical insurance; keep in mind these people get injured on the job)
another thing about running a handyman service and why i will not do it; people ask you to do electric work. the more someone like me invests in his life, the less i want to touch electric or gas. or heating equipment. if people learn that you will not change a light switch they think “why call him if i have to get an electrician anyway”.
and with what you say cate, your last line “they interviewed me over the phone”. if someone calls here for my services, i do not just run out and do it. i spend a half hour on the phone with them so i can be prepared when i visit or can tell them, “no this is a full on restoration and we have to prepare a quote”. keep in mind, a half an hour phone call costs the service provider time and time is money, so unless the handyperson can figure out how to cover that, it is hard to run the business and make money. i figured it out and it seems to be working well.
cate | 4 years and 9 months ago
Steve, I just read what you posted above about tools, a car, shopping. That’s very interesting and makes a lot of sense. Also there was a nationally franchised handyman service I used when I lived in Queens long ago. (They don’t exist in Brooklyn and wouldn’t work outside the borough.) They were excellent, fast, and quite expensive, as one would expect. They interviewed me over the phone and sent out a specific guy to do a specific job with everything he needed.
stevecym | 4 years and 9 months ago
see what cate says about the pan. it reminds me of what happen across the street and this is no lie: the guy was getting ready to sell the house so he brought some handymen in to “spruce” things up a bit and make the place look good. the lead show pan was also leaking and had been for months and had destroyed a wall. so he had the handymen change it. six months later the new owner is in and has to change the shower pan. i do not know what the conversation was between the handymen and the old owner, but those guys should have looked at him and said “we are not qualified”. instead they do it and f it all up and someone else foots the bill.
you will be in good hands with lombardi. he did my bathroom here and everything went as planned. it does cost money to hire him, but there are no do overs.
cate | 4 years and 9 months ago
In my experience, remarkably few jobs are suitable for a genuine handyman. Others require broader expertise to do efficiently and correctly, even if they appear to be small and simple. In my experience, a handyman could handle installing an interior door, caulking, or hanging shelves, cabinets or shades that require anchors. As far as the shower stall goes, was it installed in the 1930s? Could be a leaking lead shower pan that needs to be removed and replaced. Solution is to remove the tile from the floor and lower part of the walls, replace the shower pan and retile. You may also need access the area from the opposite side (the ceiling below and/or an adjacent wall, such as inside a closet).
stevecym | 4 years and 9 months ago
i will do small jobs but really i am a carpenter and have moved to doors. i do door restoration and since i learned so much about them restoring them, i moved to on site repairs – a handyman service for doors so to say (an expensive handyman service for doors). if i have a relationship with a customer, i will do other small things; last week i cut the iron security bars off the windows of a house for someone i had previously done work for; its brainless work once you have an angle grinder. last year i rebuilt some doors and the customer was so happy with the finish he wanted me to finish his staircase – but i was too busy with doors to get to that and i moved on and to tell you the truth, i really liked working for that guy and was sorry i did not help him.
let me continue here so folks can understand more about what running a handyman service might entail and why it might be difficult to find people::
i tried running a full on handyman service when i stopped doing carpentry in manhattan and began servicing brooklyn. it is really hard. i had to have a van pac ked with every concievable tool (i had so many tools in the van, my entire life was in the van, that i was worried it would get stolen just for the tools; i had riders on two insrance policies just for the tools) and then scraps of drywall, and materials and plaster and stains and ……. and parking and…. that may be that is why people don’t do it. i can see doing it in the suburbs where if you have to run out for a piece of drywall it does not become an afternoon. working on doors, i can fit all the tools in the trunk of an old volvo sedan and some hinges and locks on the seat next to me and i can use a volvo wagon to carry the doors on the roof.
parking is a big deal and as we get older carrying the tools and materials becomes more of an issue. becuase your most experienced people might be in their 50’s, they will also be worried about an injury. it might force people to do other things. when someone calls me to do hourly work in manhattan, i pay someone to sit in the car at a hydrant (often my son but sometimes others). working on entry doors in brooklyn, i can leave the car at a hydrant with a door open and paint can on the roof and watch it with one eye and the traffic agents will leave it alone. but if i have to work inside a house, i have to find parking and you can spend an hour looking for parking for a one hour job; makes no sense.
the logistics of working in the city forces a lot of people to focus and limit their talents. the sad thing is, when this happens, you get stuck with men who want to be handymen for all the wrong reasons – some of them may literally be unemployable elsewhere or have very limited skills with no formal training and you end up with headaches.
(and by the way, i was not being sexist when i said men, i meant “men”. when women enter this field they succeed because they know they have to learn twice as much, twice as fast as men but the sad thing with them is, they too find it easier to specialize and whatever they do they become very good at it leaving a bunch of guys around who don’t have the where with all to walk into NYC technical college in metro tech center and take a class)
robertbullock | 4 years and 9 months ago
Thanks Steve, I’ll try Chris Lombardi. What sorts of jobs are you more comfortable with?
stevecym | 4 years and 9 months ago
you want to know the truth, i have tiled two or three bathrooms. i can get through anything with success (i know, people don’t believe that; i changed the engine in my wife’s car two years ago and my neighbors thought i was crazy when i did that; i am 56 but it took me 5 days to do). this is the problem: i can do it but am way too slow at things i do not have experience with. you need a tiler. chris lomabardi; he can do this without thinking and with his eyes closed. see if you can google him – i cannot locate his number now.
also, it seems people are very busy. i have never been busier in my life.
if i think of a small free lance tiler, i will post. there was a guy running around brooklyn and he was good but that was 10 years ago and i lost touch with him.
robertbullock | 4 years and 9 months ago
Thanks Steve, I’m very happy to pay the going rate for the work and have always done. But it doesn’t solve the reliability problem. If you are offering up your services, could you email me at rbullock@gmail.com? One big job is retiling a shower stall that, despite several repairs, still leaks (everyone’s guess is that our contractor, who did a hatchet job all round, probably didn’t put in a waterproofing layer). Doesn’t pretty much every brownstoner have someone to call for light carpentry, installing a doorbell, or other minor repairs? Of my friends in the neighborhood (Bed Stuy), I don’t know anyone who can recommend someone! By the way, we are upstate for the time being, making reliability even more important.
stevecym | 4 years and 10 months ago
this is what i learned doing this kind of work. and technically, the door repair side of my business (the work i can do on site) is a handyman service, only for doors. if they are not charging enough money, they have to overbook and work their behinds off. it allows for less down time and no room for error. i found that once i raised my prices by a lot, i was able to better schedule work and if something ran over it did not compromise some other job.
keep in mind. now a days there are three types of handymen. those who have a full time gig and do this for “beer money”, those who have other issues and cannot work a regular job, and those who are pros and carry insurance and are planning for the future; their is going to be a price spread across the three and when you move to the pro, you will have to pay close to what any other trade gets because their overhead begins to look like any other trade.
also, i have been working with my hands literally since i was a child. i have at one time or another put my hand to everything there is to be done around a house. that does not mean i am good at it all. i hate masonry work. i don;t like drywall and plaster work. don’t like tiling. my point is, even if we have been at this a long time (i am 56) we cannot get good at all of this and if people are in this because they think it is easy or no one will hire them someplace else, they will fail at it. its not easy. and then, all the tools a handyman must carry. in new york city this is hard work, just getting to the job is hard work.
‘if you can find someone who is insured you will be looking at someone more committed to what they are doing. look to spend a bit more money. see if they advertise. if they exist out of the shadows they will be careful to really learn what they are doing and perform well as they will be more likely to suffer the consequences if they don’t.
all this comes from a very small contractor.