Choosing a builder: How to Pick the Right Contractor

The builder you pick shapes the price, the schedule, the quality of the work, and whether the whole year is bearable. It is the most important decision in the project, and it happens early, before you have watched any of them work. Here is how to choose well with the information you can actually get.

Hire for pop-top experience specifically

A second story is a specific kind of hard. It stacks new weight on an old foundation, opens a roof to the sky, ties fresh framing into walls built decades ago, and has to satisfy a structural engineer at every step. A great kitchen remodeler has not necessarily done any of that. Ask flatly how many second-story additions the firm has finished, in Denver, in the last few years. The gallery and the permit records on this site exist partly for this. Many Denver builders are named on the projects they have done, so you can see the work before you ever place a call.

Go see their past work

The best reference is a finished pop top you can stand in front of. Ask any builder you are weighing for addresses of second stories they have built, ideally ones a few years old, so you can see how the work has aged. A builder proud of their pop tops hands over a list without blinking.

Drive by. Where you can, knock and ask the homeowner two things: would you hire them again, and what surprised you. Watch how they react to the questions.

The credits in the gallery here are a neutral place to start identifying architects and builders you'd like to work with.

Check the boring things

Before the conversation gets to design, confirm the basics. The firm should carry a current Colorado license for the work and real liability and workers' compensation insurance, and they should hand you proof without stalling. Ask whether they pull the permit in their own name. A builder who wants you to pull an owner permit on a job this size is putting the liability on you, and that is a reason to walk. Call two references from projects that wrapped more than a year ago, because the problems that matter surface after the warranty conversations start.

Read the whole bid, past the bottom line

The cheapest bid is rarely the cheapest project. Compare what each one includes. A low number usually hides something: a thin scope, skinny allowances for finishes you will blow past, work left out that comes back as change orders, optimism about how long it all takes. Line the bids up against each other item by item. Where one sits thousands under the rest, find out why before you celebrate. Look hard at the allowances, the dollar figures penciled in for finishes not yet chosen. Lowballed allowances make a bid look lean and hand you the difference later at full price.

Ask how they handle the hard parts

How a builder answers a hard question up front predicts how they handle a hard day later. Ask how change orders get priced and approved. Find out what happens when an inspection fails, or when the framers open a wall to rot nobody could see. Have them walk you through how your job slots in against their others, and who stands on the site day to day. What you want back is a straight answer. A builder who has done this a hundred times has a calm, specific process for each of these. Vagueness here is the thing to watch.

Trust the fit, too

By the time you are choosing, two or three firms may all be capable, licensed, insured, and experienced. At that point the tie-breaker is the working relationship. You are about to spend a year in close contact with these people, through stress and dust and money. Pick the one who listens and takes the time to explain a trade-off instead of waving it off. Any of them can build the house. The fit decides whether you dread calling them in month seven.

When you are ready to start these conversations, the cost guide and the permit timeline give you the numbers to test a builder's answers against, and the homes in the gallery are the work itself, credited where we know who did it.