Understand Your Warranty It’s common practice these days — and a legal requirement in many states — to offer a warranty, but if you’re careless with the language in your contract, you could end up in hot water.
“You need to be clear on what your warranty obligations are,” Ittig says. Are you guaranteeing the quality of the materials or just the craftsmanship? Will you repair faulty items or replace them? Will you charge for labor or do the whole thing gratis? How long does the warranty last? “There are a whole series of questions that need to be addressed,” Ittig says. “Too many contractors copy from someone else, and they don’t realize what obligations they’ve taken on.”
This last point is important. Many remodelers put together their contracts by taking a clause from here and borrowing some language from there. There are a couple of problems with this. One, the required language for certain clauses, such as right of recision, varies from state to state, so you may be jeopardizing the legality of your contract. Second, as Ittig points out, “if you borrow clauses from different sources, you aren’t going to understand the relationships between them.” As a result, you may end up with a contract that contradicts itself in certain places. If your current contract resembles a patchwork quilt, you should take it to an attorney — preferably one who specializes in construction law — and have him or her look it over and clean it up.
In fact, if your contract hasn’t been examined by a legal professional, now is a good time to do it — before you get burned. Ittig recommends that you discuss with your attorney how you run your business and what problems, if any, you’ve had in the past.
Once you’ve got a solid, complete document, review it every couple of years to make sure it’s working. “Have people balked at a certain provision?” asks Ittig. “Have people said they don’t like certain clauses and it kept them from signing the contract? If so, it may be a bad decision to continue to use that contract.”