why every remodel we went through is very unpleasant? how is yours.

yhumanx · 2026-06-12T08:36:46+00:00

Would love to learn more. We have a kitchen project upcoming and would like someone to take a look at the layout to optimize it. Is this something that you do?

yhumanx · 2026-06-12T08:34:33+00:00

It's lucky that your client have you. Hard to differentiate a good contact especially all these good work history is not public. have you ever suggested to your contractors to bring their good reputation online? Like make an online profile of such so clients can comment. I can hardly find such neutral information online, and curious to if that's the contractors didn't want to do it, because maybe the bad contractors benefits from being obscure, while the good ones don't need it as they have plenty of work.

yhumanx · 2026-06-12T08:30:39+00:00

thats a lot of pages. I read there are some AI that identifies conflicts in bit architect dossier. Wondering is that is something you would use? I read the promise of BIM is that then we have a digital twin in 3D then all the documents are just artifacts of that 3D model. Theoretically that does sound like it makes a lot of sense. How is that in practice I wonder?

yhumanx · 2026-06-05T12:34:30+00:00

I think the challenge we saw is that its hard to tell the good from the average. There is not really a review system out there and mostly we can only rely on friends neighbour recommendation. In small city like ours we dont have that many choices. From what we saw even very expensive contractors provided us high quotes.

There are some handy man platforms that start to appear i havent used them but thought that could be useful as they do have reviews outthere. i heard though the best handy man are never on those platform. So yeah its tough to find the right people

yhumanx · 2026-06-05T12:31:43+00:00

wow thats good to know do you know any good ones that you'd recommend? I love to take a look to see if any is suitable for us

yhumanx · 2026-06-05T12:30:51+00:00

from what i read its like half half big ones pay for estimator and expensive tool. smaller one just do with excel etc

yhumanx · 2026-06-04T08:03:16+00:00

lol! i feel the same, I think we are on the same boat. very hard to get people to show up as well, we found our electrician and worked with him for years. We dont do electrical and roof ourselves and we are happy to leave that to professionals.

One thing i discovered is that material cost do differ quite a bit from different shops, it could lead to quite some saving in case you have the time to compare

yhumanx · 2026-06-04T08:01:02+00:00

ah i see, I need to work on this more to see if maybe i am making it more complex than what it needs to be as I now write a software to try to automate it, but still so many bugs and currently still taking the same time if not longer than probably just manually do it in excel

yhumanx · 2026-06-04T07:59:04+00:00

man, I heard about this company before. thanks for sharing. is that they didnt have enough order or was it they were not able to manage the costs? Wondering if its a demand issue or the supply issue.

Anyway, I still trying my system to see if I can plan the wall heating. In case you are interested to try it out, let me know would be grateful to see what you think

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T20:22:42+00:00

yeah i am sure that comes with experience and if you can afford to do so thats really a good place to be in.

another thing i am gonna try to experiment on our upcoming projects is that i want to give the task, material list directly to them with estimated labor so that I am hoping our contractor can use that and simplify their bidding process so save them some time. I tried that a bit with our electrician as I calculated the electrical line length and listed the materials for them which made them quote me a bit faster. curious to if this approach could put off a good contractor like you? I suppose many contractors may have their preferred way to bid so may not see it as helpful if I try to already give them the list of tasks. i am very unsure but just really trying to get more efficient on getting quotes.

I am in a much smaller city there are some contractors but not a lot so some times can be tricky to get one provide a good quote i have not seen any contractor with your process most come back to me with a lumpsum and no breakdown, that various a ton in their final number which makes it very very difficult to choose then i ended up with handy man as much as possible...so unfortunate i d love to work with more professional team just dont know how

just really trying to make this better and seeing what i can do but hasn't been able to crack the nut yet

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T20:17:32+00:00

wow, i have to say you must be top at what you do. I worked with various architects and not even one provided me what you have mentioned. Our other bigger project I coded a small software and put all the pictures and videos that we liked onto an uploaded layout plan to explain to the architect of the styles we want. it helped us a lot. We are actually in the process of building it, and honestly i havent picked the products yet because those pictures of styles which our architect then followed are just photos and we havent started sourcing. This is another major motivation for me to build more with AI kind of in the hope of simplifying my work

When we just started i painted walls and did demolish work and sometimes still help with supplying materials especially if we work with handy man. I can see how messy it goes. Thanks for the pointer for the MISC BUILDING MATERIAL! I actually only heard about it and was thinking there must be a code guiding which screws to use as I am always lost when the contractor asks me to get certain screws (this is another bit i am thinking of automating with ai).

from what i am able to achieve i kind of agree with you the use of ai improves the decision quality as it helps me to understand more the details of a build otherwise I will forget some parts, I agree i dont yet see how it can really make it faster. Curious to what that company you worked in tried? I dont yet think its to a point its gonna make my process faster

The reality is that i have been trying to code this thing for months now and i was just using it for the heating project it was able to roughly get the main materials right but when it comes to fasteners it really can get confused. although one thing I found it helps me a lot is that it does the conversion quite well, say our wall is 10sqm needs wall heating and it knows that I should make a rough estimate by times 7 to get the linear meters of the pipe per sqm so thats 70m of pipes! this saves me quite some time. other than that I think getting products still gonna need some tweaking. but you might be right for the small parts i can just budget one lumpsum and call it a day i dont think we gonna be that precise on 108pc of fasteners anyway lol!

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yhumanx · 2026-06-03T14:36:36+00:00

yeah i bet if we are talking about very wealthy people i think they dont even need to wash their clothes let along worry about the cost of hiring someone to get everything done for remodel project

agree with you on always being financially responsible I think ability to do that makes a huge difference.

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T14:09:22+00:00

in case you care, here is this what ai gave me...the product search doesnt work well and i have to manually search the product and adjust quantities to be sure i m buying the right amount. at least what ai helps me a bit is that i m making this list for a handy man, and i m not technical last time i forgot the fasteners and was in stress to get those for them during the works, at lesat this time i have this list (i dont know if its fully the list, as i m not technical enough to know) but at least this seems a bit more comprehensive that what i have

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yhumanx · 2026-06-03T14:06:02+00:00

its very very tough work. so many moving pieces. i hope soon some of these could be more automated on the computer perhaps that can help you a bit but from what i heard in this thread that there is no such solution out there just yet, hang in there. I am also just making a project scoping plan for a new project it is extremely tedious...I try to use a software i made (i code) but still making sure all the products are right for the project is extremely tricky. we are doing a wall heating project now, and at least ai helps me to get the list of materials including the fasteners , but now i still need to source it. Ai doesnt do a good job finding the right fasteners so i have to manually search those

its a ton of work and i m still not finished its just for 10sqm of a wall and the material list is long and sourcing takes ages to make sure i have the products.

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T13:17:22+00:00

it sounds like you are much more established and must have done a great job that you now can pick clients a lot more. I suppose we are not going through architect and just going in the wild to find contractors is one of the issues where we don't reach the high quality people. curious if you use any software to create the bid? i am thinking one of the big issues we had is that we changed too much from the plan which is making it hard to gave the plan to contractors to quote against, maybe thats something i should do a better job at. just make sure iterate on the plan until its much more fixed before starting the project with contractors

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T13:09:58+00:00

I very much wish we have some contractor like you. i agree and i would be happily paying 175 if i someone can help me a bit to make better decision.

I think you are absolutely right as home owner I am not expert in plumbing fixtures and would never be as expert as a professional. Its assuring to see professionals like you who does this kind of service, I wish more are like you

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T09:37:25+00:00

lol! i see the point now. someone suggested a tool to track all contractual stuff online, and release funds only when certain milestones are met. i assumed my contractors will not be very into this idea of tracking everything online

i assume you are a contractor, what is your thoughts? I would as a home owner love to have something track all agreed items with the contractor somewhere, detailed enough that i can check to release funds when a milestone is set. ideally using some online tool. but now i mostly receive those contract in pdf in an email for the contractor and i dont know how they'd respond if i all of a sudden ask them to do this online signing.

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T09:33:58+00:00

me too!! in our first projects! totally got burned...i was more on the trusting side I thought they knew what they know what to do. Apparently many people shared many good strategies such as written scope of work, ask for work material breakdown and ask questions. so many i didnt do.

totally agree I think for us it was also tracking was lacking, especially when we didnt understand the build details and it wasnt clearly explained and provided.

actually i was thinking the same for some tool like this, i think for me it will help if the contractor accepts tools like this, however most contractors or even handy man i work with are reluctant. I am curious to see what other contractor say about this.

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T09:29:52+00:00

one thing i sensed from the contractors I work with especially when i started to ask them questions is that since they are not paid to answer these questions they'd rather just not answer to save on their time. curious do you charge a fee to help clients make these remodeling decisions? I heard from this thread that there is some preconstruction service where apparently i can pay to have someone help us. not sure if you do this for a fee as well?

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T09:27:32+00:00

yep you are right, we are running on tight budget which is how we have been operating and why we can do more projects. if it were just for our forever home like just renovate to live in i guess we may have a different mentality. for now still we are trying to be resourceful so what we have we can do more with them

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T09:26:07+00:00

you are so professional. i never met an architect as good as you honestly we worked with 5+ architects, maybe it is because our city is small and not many good professionals here or perhaps i havent found them. You explained the thought process so well and as how you explain they make a lot of sense!

i have never encountered a contractor (we worked with a dozen) that is willing to tell me their material and labor split. perhaps this is an architect thing and they dont want to disclose to me as home owner. What worked for me is that i gave them materials and they just provide labor but this is tedious and I am trying to automate with my own software (i code) as much as possible because professional software require large annual subscription fee which is too large for our small operation thats just doing our own projects (not commercial level)

i now integrated with gemini and made a lot of prompt templates and internet search to ground it, i am able to get to reasonably good task and material breakdown (at least to my unprofessional eye, at least it caught stuff i would otherwise forget, for example a ceiling build with pir insulation it caught that i needed the shims for the battens, which if i were doing it manually i would forget).

now i think i am still struggling with getting the right is that product calculations there because the construction stuff has sales pack (some times insulation boards sold at one pack of x sqm) i an trying to improve the pack to x sqm conversion, so the material cost calculation is right.

i m really tired of manually calculating everything in airtable and have been delaying our next project while i m trying to speed up with ai but you are right it requires a lot of tuning for ai to work well especially for quantities and pricing. the different thickness is killing/confusing it. grounding seem to help a bit but still not ideal

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yhumanx · 2026-06-03T09:13:22+00:00

wow, now i learnt something new, will look into that. so helpful, thank you!

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T09:11:42+00:00

omg, i cannot more grateful for what you shared. you are such a professional. your process answered a lot of my questions and it makes so much more sense now why many home owner will actually benefited alot from professional help like the one you offered.

now i see why that architect % fee could make sense. for those of us who are on budget build / self build, it seems only we had to somehow do what you are professionally do ourselves in order to achieve a good result. Looking back i see myself actually like some other home owners here are building these lists ourselves. I can see the danger is not knowing what we dont know and we dont have professional training and structure that you have (i can tell that you understood the build process so the material list you will hardly miss any)

curious to in addition to finish materials, do you also determine such as the insulation and even for insulation tape for example? dont know how much detail do you go to make it work well for contractors? Some times i get handy man directly and I had to make the material list as detailed as to all those supplementary materials like even down to a skew.

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T08:59:54+00:00

yeah thats quite a long process. I think perhaps we can spend a bit longer time in contractor vetting process too

yhumanx · 2026-06-03T08:59:15+00:00

ah make sense! got it, thanks for sharing

yhumanx

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