Paving your driveway can be a very enticing investment with enormous benefits. It immediately upgrades the look of your home or property, requires less maintenance and help keep your home and automobiles clean. A neatly paved driveway can significantly bump up the value of your property in the real estate market. It serves as a stunning welcome mat to your home, sending an important message of tidiness and cleanliness to your visitors.
But paving doesn’t come cheap. This means, while a lot of people avoid paving because of the price tag, others hire paving contractors solely based on cost. It’s good to be price conscious, but hiring a paving professional solely based on their fees is a bad idea.
Sure, cheap doesn’t always have to be bad quality, but a lot of paving contractor with temptingly cheap quotations will end up cooking up your driveway in a horrible way. This defeats the whole purpose of paving in the first place. Instead of increasing your property’s value, a crappy driveway is going to pull it down.
But that could be the least of your problems. Getting strung up with the wrong paving contractor could bring heavy financial losses and lots of frustration. If you choose to get your driveway paved, it’s important to be very prudent in choosing a paving contractor. For your reading delight, we’ve put together some important things you should consider when hiring a paving contractor.
Positive Reviews
One of the greatest criteria for hiring any contractor is a generally positive review. When looking for a pavement contractor, ask for reviews from anyone who has hired one recently. Using reviews from close friends, neighbors and relatives can help narrow down your search. If you can’t get information in your immediate community, the internet has an enormous wealth of reviews. Look up the contractor online and track what their previous clients are saying about them. Generally, positive reviews indicate that the contractor is good at what they do.
But be cautious with online reviews, some of them aren’t particularly trustworthy. The may be paid reviews or the reviewers may be offered some form of incentives for positive reviews. Whatever the case, the best way to get honest reviews is through word of mouth from neighbors and relatives since they are more likely to be honest with you.
Experience
It’s common sense; the quality of job you get from experienced paving contractors will certainly outshine ones from those who just got into the business. Having been on the job for a while, experienced VA beach paving pros understand not just what it takes to get the job done, but the best way to get it done.
There are horror stories, of paving contractors who underestimated the cost of paying jobs only to halt the job midway, asking for extra cash. Hiring people who have done a job over and over again reduces the chances of getting stuck in an underestimation dilemma.
Insurance Coverage
The importance of hiring paving contractors with proper insurance coverage cannot be overemphasized. Sometimes accidents could be unavoidable no matter how much safety measures we put in place. Paving contractors experience accidents from time to time. It could be a minor incident not causing much trouble, or it could be something that leads to serious injuries or damages to your property.
Since they will be working on your property, it’s important that they have insurance coverage to cover any damages that might occur while working on your property. But most contractors are aware of the client’s preference for contractors with insurance. Because of this, the take out as little insurance as possible – usually the minimum insurance required by state laws. It’s your right to be protected as much as possible. Ensure that your contractor’s insurance includes Auto Liability, General Liability, Workers Compensation as well as Umbrella policy. Also preferably, ensure they have more than $500,000 per policy coverage. The higher the amount in policy coverage, the more protected you are.
Down Payment Policy
While we support down payments for bigger projects, if your paving project is worth $10,000 or less, you shouldn’t have to pay any down payments. While this shouldn’t be much of a consideration, fraudulent paving contractors can misuse your deposits and end up asking for more. Since they may be probably working on other projects as well, your down payments could be used to complete other people’s unfinished jobs.
So, as a rule of thumb, always have an honest chat with any paving contractor you wish to hire. Ask them about their down payment policy and what they’d need the money for. Hire VA beach paving pros that have a credit relationship with tools suppliers. That way, they are able to do your job with the needed tools and materials without requiring much in down payments.
Type Of Equipment
Before hiring a paving contractor, ask them about the type of equipment they’ll be using to execute your project. While we are all in love with skillful hand craftsmanship, paving with hands and machines are in two different worlds. Any paving contractor that promises to do the same quality of work you’d get using a machine by hand is probably playing around. Unless of course, for some reasons, you need your job done by hands, you should only hire contractors with the proper equipment.
The emphasis here is on proper equipment. Do not allow the allure of using fancy equipment for your job robe you in. Ask questions and do a little personal observation. Find out how long the machine has been in service, whether it is the right tool for the job and how efficient the people operating it are.
There are probably hundreds of paving contractors in any local market. Take your time to have a chat with them and ask pertinent questions. Get as much information about them as possible before making educated decisions on VA beach paving pros to hire for your project.