Calculating Risks

At some point this week, a man I barely know will come into my house and begin punching holes in my living room walls. Most of the time while he is doing this, I will not be home. Only my dog, who weighs 34 pounds, will be on hand to supervise.

A few days later, I will give this man a check in the mid-four figures. Then we will both take out our calendars – mine on a Droid, his an old-school DayTimer – and plan for the next time I will pay him to break things in my house.

There is a word for people like this man: contractor. Through a recommendation from a good friend and very little vetting outside of that, we have entered into an oral contract that ideally will result in thousands of dollars in income for him and new built-in living room cabinets, new windows, built-in speakers and, later this summer, badly-needed exterior paint for our entire house.

I feel very comfortable, based on how my friend's house turned out (and some minor work this same contractor did for us a few years ago) that all parties will be satisfied in the end.

But why? How do I know this? The last time we had work done, we used my father-in-law to complete an extensive kitchen remodel. While I knew nothing about his reputation as a contractor, I did at least know that he was capable of producing the kind of daughter I’d want to spend my life with. Also, that time we were not only on hand but intimately involved with the project – as laborers. It was low-risk that way.

Anytime you hire a contractor – even if he is your father-in-law – you’re taking a risk. Just ask Simon and Tina Jang of Burlingame. Thanks to some shoddy advice from a structural engineer, their addition project went sideways, costing an unplanned $500,000 and leaving the Jangs hopping mad and looking for someone to sue. The story made the news because the Jang’s contractor was Burlingame Vice Mayor Jerry Deal.

There’s a lesson in here. Deal’s design and architecture firm, J Deal Associates, is no fly-by-night operation. The firm is known and respected locally, specializing in large, custom homes and big-ticket remodels.

“Our staff and team of consultants is the best,” says the J Deal Associates web site. “We know what to do…and how to do it.”

“It’s simple…DON’T WORRY.”

The Jangs ended up worrying. Two months into their project they were informed that their home’s existing structure and foundation couldn’t support the expansion.

Deal, when contacted by The San Jose Mercury News, said simply, “The engineer assumes all responsibilities for the calculations.”

“The engineer” is not Deal. It is, however, an engineer he hired: Chu Design & Engineering, a no-less established firm responsible for, by their estimate, “thousands” of successful projects since their 1988 founding.

This story is news mostly because it involves a high-profile person. Deal’s “talk to my lawyer” interaction with the press could be based on him thinking – rightly so – that if he were Jerry Deal, contractor, and not Jerry Deal, vice mayor, the problems with the Jangs could be settled quietly.

Instead, he woke up last Thursday to find his name in the paper – and not in a positive way. He could also be thinking – also rightly so – that if you stay in the business of construction long enough, you’re bound to end up on one end or another of a dispute like this.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s not that Jerry Deal is a crook, that Chu Design & Engineering is incompetent or that the Jangs are merely being difficult clients. Instead, it’s more about the nature of large-scale projects, expectations and the impossibility of covering all your bases.