Six questions into a meeting with a remodeler, you can usually tell how the firm prices work. Everything after that is detail. Most lists of questions to ask a contractor run to twenty or thirty items and spread your attention across dust control, references, subcontractors and cleanup — all worth knowing, none of them the thing that decides whether the number you are shown resembles the number you eventually pay.
So this is a short list, and it is only about money. We have written it as the questions themselves, with what each answer tends to mean. Ask them of us too.
“Is this a bid or an estimate?”
Start here, because the two words get used interchangeably in conversation and mean very different things on paper. An estimate is a projection based on incomplete information — a considered guess about a project that has not been fully designed. A bid is a price for a defined scope.
The answer you want is specific and unhesitating. If someone tells you the distinction does not really matter, or that “everybody’s estimate moves a little,” you have learned something important: the price you are being shown is a starting position, not a commitment. That is not necessarily dishonest. It is simply a different arrangement than the one most homeowners think they are entering, and the difference lands on you.
Our own answer is that we do not issue estimates for construction at all. We price projects as fixed bids, once the design is complete.
“How much of this number is an allowance?”
This is the single most revealing question on the list, and it is worth asking about a document you are holding, line by line.
An allowance is a placeholder — a sum carried for something not yet chosen. Tile allowance. Lighting allowance. Plumbing fixture allowance. Countertop allowance. On paper they look like real numbers. In practice they are the mechanism by which a total quietly grows, because the allowance was set before anyone knew what you would actually pick, and the real selection is almost never cheaper than the placeholder. It is the moment a homeowner falls in love with a tile and discovers that loving it costs extra.
Ask what happens when a selection comes in above the allowance, who tracks the difference, and when you will be told. Ask whether labor is included in the allowance or only material, because a stone that requires a different fabrication carries labor with it. A firm that can answer all three cleanly is at least running its allowances honestly.
Our position is that allowances are avoidable rather than inevitable. If every material is selected before the project is priced — and on our projects they are — there is nothing left to hold a place for.
“When do you price the project, before or after design?”
This question sounds procedural. It is actually the whole thing.
A price produced before design has to make assumptions about the work: where the plumbing runs, whether the wall between the kitchen and dining room is carrying load, what the cabinetry is, how the electrical will be brought up to code. In a 1920s Seattle house, those assumptions are doing a great deal of load-bearing of their own. Every one that turns out to be wrong becomes a conversation later, during construction, when you have the least leverage and the least appetite for it.
A price produced after design has answers instead of assumptions. That is the reason our clients get an exact fixed cost before signing a construction contract, and it is why the design phase in our process comes first and is taken seriously rather than treated as a free sales step.
“What happens to the price when you open a wall and find something?”
Ask this one plainly, and listen for whether the answer is honest rather than comforting.
Older Seattle housing stock hands over real surprises. Knob-and-tube wiring still live behind plaster. Galvanized supply lines. Framing that was modified decades ago by someone who did not ask anyone. A subfloor that has been quietly wet. Nobody can see through a wall, and any firm that implies it can is telling you what you want to hear.
What separates firms is not whether they encounter these things, it is how much they have done to find them in advance and how they handle the ones that remain. Good answers involve investigation during design — opening things up, checking the panel, looking at what is accessible from the basement — so that fewer conditions are unknown by the time construction starts. Then a clear, written process for the ones that are genuinely undiscoverable.
A weak answer sounds like: “We’ll let you know if we run into anything.” That is not a process. That is a bill you have not seen yet.
“Who decides what counts as a change order, and what does one cost me?”
Change orders are legitimate. They exist because homeowners change their minds and because houses hide things. What matters is the definition and the paperwork.
Ask who writes them, whether you approve in advance in writing, whether the price includes the schedule impact as well as the cost, and — the question people forget — what the firm’s own markup on a change order is. Ask also what does not require a change order, because a firm that treats every small clarification as billable will produce a very different experience than one that only writes them for real scope changes.
If the answer is vague, assume the vagueness is deliberate. A firm with a disciplined change process can describe it in about a minute.
“Can I see how detailed your pricing gets?”
You are not asking to audit anyone’s margin. You are asking whether the number is built up from actual scope or handed down as a lump.
A thin bid — a few large categories and a total — cannot be compared with anything, cannot be checked against the plans, and gives you no way to know what was left out. A detailed one lets you see that the electrical scope includes the panel work, that the drywall line accounts for plaster repair, that demolition and disposal are in there, that permits are in there.
Ask what is explicitly excluded, too. Exclusions are where a bid tells the truth about itself. If you are still assembling a list of firms to ask any of this, our post on building a shortlist is a reasonable place to start.
Taken together, these six questions tell you one thing: whether the firm has done the work required to know the price, or is asking you to carry the parts they have not figured out yet. Both models exist in this market. Only one of them lets you sign a construction contract knowing what the project costs.
We are happy to be asked all six, in any order, with a document in your hand. If you’d like to see what a fully designed, fully specified, fixed-price project actually looks like on paper, that conversation starts with a design consultation from NOR Design & Construction. Book one, or call 206.979.3420 and ask us the hard version first.
