While Your Project Is Running · Greater Phoenix

How Often Should Your Remodeler Update You?

Ask anyone who has been through a bad remodel what went wrong. They rarely start with the dust.

They start with the silence. The text that went unanswered on Thursday. The three days where nobody showed up and nobody said why. The slow realization that if they wanted to know what was happening in their own house, they were going to have to chase somebody down for it.

That is the part that turns a remodel into a bad memory. Not the noise, not the mess, not even the change orders. The not knowing.

So we wrote our side of it down, and we hand it to every client before we start. Here it is before you hire anybody.

Let's Start the Conversation See How We Work

The Short Answer

What you should expect from any remodeler

You should expect a response to every message within one business day, every time, including the messages that do not have an answer yet. You should expect one person who owns your project and knows the whole picture, and a second name to go to if that person goes quiet.

You should expect a written summary at the end of every week that tells you what got done, what is coming, what the crew needs from you, and what is happening at your house over the weekend. You should expect to be told about a delay or a found condition on the day it is known, not on the day you notice it. And you should expect all of that in writing, in one place, still findable eight months later.

That is our standard. It is not the industry standard, which is most of the reason this page exists.

The Arithmetic Nobody Explains

Why communication falls apart on most jobs

It is almost never that your contractor stopped caring. It is arithmetic.

A superintendent running six jobs at once cannot be reachable on any of them. He is standing on one job site while five other homeowners are texting him, and every one of those messages is sitting in his pocket behind whatever is on fire in front of him. He is not ignoring you. He is underwater, and he knows it, and there is nothing in his week that fixes it.

Our superintendents run two or three projects at a time. That is the whole trick. It is not a philosophy or a promise about attitude, it is a staffing decision we made and hold, and it is the reason the rest of this page is possible to keep.

It is also one of the practical reasons we run design and construction under one roof. The team that drew your project is the team that builds it, so there is no second company to relay a question to.

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Two or three you can actually stay on top of. Six you cannot, and everyone involved knows it.

The Escalation Path

Who to call, in order

When a question skips to the top, the person answering it has less information than the person who should have answered it, and the answer usually has to get walked back. That is where most of the "I thought you said" problems on a job site are born. So we ask you to work it in order.

Your Project Manager

Start Here, Every Time

Everything starts here. Questions, concerns, requests, scheduling, "is that supposed to look like that." Your project manager has the whole picture of your job, and on any given day he is the only person who does. You will meet him before construction starts and you will have his direct number.

Devan Hochuli

Director of Operations

If you have not heard back within one business day, or the answer is not resolving it, go to Devan. You are not tattling and you are not going over anyone's head. This step is built in on purpose, so that a dropped message never becomes your problem to chase.

Scott Hochuli

Founder

Still not resolved? Come to Scott. He would rather hear about it while it is small than read about it in a review.

Scott reads every message that comes through the portal and walks jobs every week. Step three exists, and it is rare, and both of those things are on purpose.

Three Channels, One Rule Each

Where your messages go

Channel	Use it for	Answered
JobTread, your project portal	Everything that is not urgent. Questions, photos, requests, approvals.	Within one business day
Our office line (602) 451-0323	Anything time sensitive during business hours.	Same business day
After hours emergency line	Emergencies only. The list is further down this page.	Immediately

Why a portal instead of a text thread

A text sits in one person's phone. If that person is on a roof, on vacation, or home with a sick kid, your request sits there with them and nobody else can see it.

A message in the portal is timestamped, attached to your project, and still findable in eight months when somebody asks what we agreed to.

More importantly, it is not sitting with one person. We set up access so that everyone working on your project can see it. Your project manager, Devan, the designer who drew your plans, whoever is handling your selections and orders. If your question is really a design question, the person who can answer it is already looking at it. Nobody has to relay anything, and nothing waits for one person to be free.

Texts are how details get lost. This is how they get kept.

What you can actually see in there

Your schedule. Daily logs with photos from the job. Every change order. Every invoice, which you can also pay from your phone. Selections and approvals.

Not a summary of your project. Your project.

Every Friday By 3:00pm

The Friday recap

Most weekend messages are not emergencies. They are anxiety with a phone in its hand. The Friday recap answers the weekend's questions on Friday afternoon, before anybody has to ask them.

A daily log tells you what happened. That is useful and we post those too. But a daily log never answers the two questions that actually keep people up:

What do you need from me, and by when?

What is going to happen at my house over the weekend?

So every Friday, before 3:00pm, a written recap goes into your portal. Five parts, in the same order every week.

Where the project stands

One sentence, in plain words. "Demo is done and the framing inspection passed, so we are on track."

Finished this week

What actually got completed, not what got started. With photos.

Coming next week

Which trades, which days where we know them. If something is genuinely an if, we say if. A recap that overpromises is worse than no recap.

What we need from you

Every open decision, with the date it is needed by. If there is nothing, it says nothing from you this week. That block never gets left off, because a missing block reads as a hidden ask.

Over the weekend

Crew on site or not. Deliveries or not. What stays up, what stays off, what stays locked. Water, power, and air conditioning status.

Why the last block matters most

"Nobody will be at your house Saturday or Sunday. The dumpster stays until Monday. The plastic across the dining room doorway stays up. Your water is on and will stay on."

Four sentences on a Friday afternoon that prevent a very specific and very predictable set of Saturday morning phone calls, because you already have the answer to the question you were going to ask.

A rule we hold ourselves to. The recap goes out even when the week was slow. Especially then. A quiet week with no recap reads as a stalled project.

And a second one. You never hear bad news for the first time in a recap. A delay, a found condition, or a change order gets a phone call on the day it is known. The recap confirms what you already heard. It is a record, not a delivery mechanism for surprises.

Hours, Held In Both Directions

We will not text you after hours, and we would like the same back

Our hours are 8:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Friday. If we ever need to start earlier, run later, or work a Saturday, we ask you first.

Outside those hours, and on weekends and holidays, we are with our families. We do not answer calls or texts to personal cell phones for anything that is not a true emergency, and we would ask you not to send them.

Here is the part we think matters more than the policy. We hold this in both directions. Any message to a client written after 5:00pm, on a weekend, or on a holiday is scheduled to send the next business morning. Every phone made in the last several years does this natively, so it costs nothing but the decision to do it. Your evening is worth the same as ours, and a team that never puts the phone down is a team that makes mistakes in your house.

Read this part twice

None of that means we do not want to hear from you.

Send it. Send it Saturday at 11:00pm if that is when you thought of it. Put it in the portal, attach a photo, and go back to your evening.

A comment posted in the portal at 11:00pm does not ring anybody's phone. That is a large part of why the portal is the default channel and a text thread is not. Nobody has to schedule anything and nobody has to hold anything back. It is simply sitting there Monday morning, which is when it was going to get handled either way.

The only difference is that you stopped carrying it around all weekend.

The List, Written Down In Advance

If someone could get hurt, call 911. Not us.

We are a remodeling company. We are not a fire department, we are not an ambulance, we are not a 24 hour plumber, and we are not a security service.

If there is fire, smoke, the smell of gas, an injury, an exposed live wire, or a stranger in your house, call 911 first and call us second. We would much rather show up an hour after the fire department did than find out we were the reason you waited.

Tonight

Worth waking us up

Fire, smoke, gas odor, injury, or anything threatening someone's safety. Call 911 first.
Water running where it should not be. Any amount. Shut the valve, then call.
No power to a critical area, or anything electrical that sparks, smells hot, or is warm to the touch.
No cooling on a day over 100 degrees, or no heat on a night below 40.
Your home cannot be locked and secured.

Morning

It can wait, and it will be handled

A cabinet door or drawer out of adjustment
A hairline crack in grout, caulk, or drywall
A paint scuff, a smudge, a nail hole, a dusty shelf
A question about the schedule
A question about an invoice
A new idea, a change, or something you would like added
A truck parked somewhere you would rather it wasn't
Anything a photo can hold until morning

Every client gets an after hours emergency line, and that number is in the binder we hand you at pre-construction, printed next to this same list. It is a phone line, not a text line. A text can sit unread on a silenced phone all night. A phone call rings. When it matters, make it ring.

Your Side Of It

The other half of this

Everything above is our side of the deal. Here is yours, and it is short.

Decisions by the date on the recap

Every open decision shows up in the Friday recap with the date it is needed by. Those dates are not arbitrary and they are not padded. A tile selection that arrives two weeks late does not delay the tile by two weeks. It delays the tile, then the grout, then the trim carpenter who was scheduled around the tile, and by the time it lands it can cost a week and a half on a job that had nothing wrong with it.

One decision maker, or two who have talked

If there are two of you, we do not need you to agree on everything. We just need to not receive opposite instructions on the same day. It happens more than you would think and it is genuinely hard to unwind.

Tell us early when something is bothering you

Small things are cheap to fix and free to talk about. The same thing at the end of the project, when the tile is set and the trim is painted, is neither.

We are not asking you to manage your remodel. That is our job, and if you find yourself doing it, we have failed at something. We are asking you to answer the questions we bring you, roughly when we bring them.

After The Last Invoice

What happens when we are finished

The end of a project is where a lot of remodelers quietly stop returning calls. The money is collected, the crew is on the next job, and the punch list turns into a slow negotiation nobody is running.

Here is our schedule instead, and it does not depend on you chasing it.

2 years

Workmanship Warranty

From substantial completion. Not ninety days.

3 check-ins

30 Days · 6 Months · 1 Year

On our calendar, not yours.

The 30 day call catches the things you only notice once you are living in it. The 6 month call catches what the first season did. The 1 year call is the one almost nobody makes.

And in month fourteen, when something needs attention, you call the same office line and reach the same people. We are not going to be hard to find. We have been in this valley since 2001, and roughly forty percent of our work is for people we have already built something for, which only works if the phone still gets answered after the last invoice clears.

Take This With You

Six questions to ask any remodeler you are considering

Including us. Every one of these has a right answer, and a vague answer to any of them tells you something worth knowing before you sign anything.