At the ripe age of 26 and with a great level of naivete and hubris I embarked on the process of building a home. My then husband and I decided that we would be perfectly capable of being our own general contractor. This I believe now is a clear sign of the hubris of youth! We thought that because we had grown up in the area where we were building and knew a lot of people that we would be able to easily find subcontractors to work on our home build. This assumption turned out to be our downfall and a true life lesson. We ended up hiring friends of the family to paint, the father of one of my high school friend’s father as a finish carpenter and a plumber that came highly recommended by our neighbors. In a perfect world this would have all added up to major savings and the security of knowing the people you were working with. However, this is not a perfect world and in the end we often couldn’t get a hold of my high school friend’s father and after charging us for a ridiculous amount of copper piping the plumber that came so highly recommended disappeared and with him all of the pipe.
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