I manage a two-family in New Dorp, on Staten Island, and I’ve been keeping a mental file on bad contractors ever since I hired the wrong one. He knocked on the door right after a windstorm, quoted a full facade and stoop repair well under everyone else, took a big deposit, and vanished after demoing half the front. Getting the job finished properly cost me nearly double, plus the weeks the upstairs unit sat torn open with no tenant able to move in. On Staten Island, where storm-chasers work neighborhoods hard after every nor’easter, catching the warning signs early is the cheapest insurance an owner has. Here’s what I actually…

A contractor once asked me for 60 percent down before he’d lift a shovel. My name is Dave Marchetti, and I’ve spent close to twenty years running hardscape, concrete, and general home improvement crews around New Haven, Connecticut, including a good number of jobs in Westville. I’m a do-it-yourselfer by nature, so handing over big money before any work happens goes against everything in me, and that number ended the conversation on the spot. I still hire out the jobs I can’t do safely, but I’ve gotten stubborn about how and when I pay. Here’s the payment structure I use now, and the math behind it. What a deposit is…

I once inspected a home just outside Buda, Texas, where a previous owner had poured a low retaining wall and framed up a covered patio without pulling a single permit. It looked solid enough standing on the porch. But there was no inspection record, no engineering on file, and a footing I had no way to verify once it was buried under six inches of soil. When the buyers asked me if it was “up to code,” the honest answer was that nobody could say — and that uncertainty knocked real money off the sale price. My name is Dale Whitfield, and I’ve spent the last 19 years inspecting homes…

A listing on Todt Hill nearly died three days before closing last spring. The sellers had handed a contractor $14,000 up front for a new front walk and railing. He tore out the old walk, and then he stopped answering his phone. What they had to show for it was a single sheet of paper with a total and a phone number — nothing that would hold up anywhere. I’ve spent years listing and selling homes on Todt Hill and around the rest of Staten Island, and the pattern I keep running into is that a bad contract does almost as much damage to resale value as bad work does.…

My name is Dave Petrillo. I’ve spent 22 years running exterior crews around New Haven, Connecticut — painting, repointing, walkways, the whole range of work that lives outside a house’s walls, mostly in East Rock and Westville, where the housing stock still leans Victorian and early-1900s. I’ll say something against my own trade: most of the horror stories homeowners tell me about “the last guy” were avoidable in the first phone call. A woman in East Rock showed me a half-finished repointing job last spring — mortar smeared everywhere, no permit pulled, and a “contractor” who stopped answering the phone the day after she paid him cash off a lawn…