August 22, 2019 By Deltahomerenovations Comments are Off ,

How To Hire A Patio Installation Service Provider in Toronto

Thinking of improving the state of your patio, or having one freshly fitted to your house in Toronto? We have some actionable advice that will help you pick out the best contractor for the job, saving you the headache of filtering through the scores of companies all insisting to be the best. Before we delve into the ‘how’ part of this exercise, it is important that we agree that regardless of how much space you already have available, or are prepared to tear off and convert into a patio, the final result should have your signature and not that of the contractor and their workmanship pattern.

It may be the same job as they do every other day, but this one is yours, as such your participation should be invested from the start to the end. This is the only way to fully enjoy every other moment that will be spent on the patio years after the project is complete. Hiring a patio installation service provider in Toronto should be taken as a project that ends with your satisfaction and a value-adding product at the end.

Let’s jump into it, shall we?

Collect Some Desired Patio Designs

It’s just a patio, right? So why should you worry so much how it’s going to come out, these guys are professionals and they can handle this while you enjoy your daily routine. Wrong. This one is not just any other patio. You could search for patio designs online and gaze at the pictures that come up, but yours should make you feel more relaxed just thinking about it. Make sure you know just how it should look, it helps if some of the pictures you come across on applications such as Pinterest match your desired patio design and layout. It gives the contractors a clear target to work towards.

A Few Inspirational Pages To Take A Look At

Another way you could accomplish this part of the hiring process is by first hiring a landscape designer to assist with envisioning how the patio will blend with the already existing greenery around your property. While you own the yard and may have been in the backyard hundreds of times, your eye could still miss a few good angles to look at this project from right at the beginning. Home improvement experts, on the other hand, will come bearing decorative material expertise and installation capability, but could also fail to capture the rest of nature’s effects on your property. Using both resources will make sure that you never have to redo the patio building process later on.

If you’re close to (and with) your neighbours, you could do a quick scan of their patios, looking to match or surpass theirs is not a bad thing. Especially considering how much value a good looking patio can add to your property when you finally decide to let it go on the market.

Keep A Budget In Mind

Regardless of how much you convince the bank to lend you for a house development project, how much to spend on your patio project should be totally up to you, and not the contractor. Some costs, such as their hourly effort charges for clearing out and setting up the workspace could be a close comparison to the average asking price on the market. The materials used, on the other hand, vary over a wider range and your preferences are a bigger variable here than anywhere else. 

A Simple Break Down Of Expected Costs

Labour Costs

These vary depending on the contractor chosen for the job. Very reputable companies will have premium rates while those only starting out will be in the lower bracket. How much you will pay will be determined mostly by the complexity of your patio project. The area to be prepared and converted into the final structure also comes in as a cost determining variable. 

Materials Costs

There are so many materials to settle for as the topping for your patio. While the underlying surfaces/layers are often of the same composition, the top layer could be anything from natural wood to stone and even synthetic plastics. 

Knowing how much you’re going to spend helps you with adjusting or expanding the project size on the ground. Once you have the pictures in hand for the desired patio, it would be wise to approach a property evaluator – any good real estate agent will do – for an appraisal of the property with the patio included. This makes it easier for you to anticipate the monetary gain from your intended spending. 

Regardless of how much you finally settle on spending on the project,  always keep in mind that moments later spent on the patio entertaining family and friends will always mark higher than any dollar you pay for the installation process.

Ask From At Least 10 Contractors

Adding ease to the process, you can directly approach some reputable contractors for quotations. Some might need to survey the premise before calling out a figure, and that is always a good sign. No two patio projects should be pegged at the same materials and installation cost because just like we are, they are never exactly the same. You should make it a habit to get a second opinion from such detail driven contractors before making the commitment to work with any of them.

Of the suggested 10 contractors to contact (call or email), be sure to include some not so known names. You wouldn’t want to miss out on lesser-known professionals that come with workmanship that no other homeowners in your neighbourhood have had the chance to see. The bigger names seldom find it hard to get contracts, and while that’s a good thing to consider, it could mean your project will come out looking like the rest of the patios they’ve worked on. A small contractor might not have as many projects to show as they might well be just opening for business, but to make up for that, they have a lot of time to invest into your project. Added to that you can as well be as involved in building out your patio from start to finish.

Read Reviews Online

Before believing every assertion made by a company on their website, be sure to read their reviews from past customers online. You learn so much more and get to see their true character this way. Social media is your honest friend when it comes to online handled due diligence. Most posts and feedback comments on the companies’ presence pages are unpaid. This gives you a lot of insight into their work ethics. 

Social media only won’t take you far when looking into how a potential contractor handles client requests, make use of directories such as Yelp to build a lucid picture of how local residents have been treated in the past. Like most businesses, it is easier to believe the marketing materials and proposals put forward by the sales teams once you’re discussing business.

You can share this task with members of your family, collectively, a few minutes to an hour of research online should scour the internet of all the good and bad feedback that comes from customers. You can learn from their mistakes and build on the good reviews’ success.

Reach Out To Their Past Customers

Taking things a step further, by sending a friendly direct message to one of their past clients, is a sure way to filter past paid reviews and attaining personal feedback. While this could yield fewer responses than you’d get by just searching for reviews, their quality is worth all the effort. Put to the test, some sociable responses even come with images of the workmanship and the relative costs to the clients. 

When approaching the contractor for the first time, it is within your rights to ask for some real-life references. Follow up on each provided and only go through with engaging the contractor if you’re happy with what you hear from their past or currently serviced customers.

Since by no means you’ll be the first one to install a patio within a 2 km radius from your house, (unless you’re located on a remote estate) it is wise to reverse engineer this process. Talk to a homeowner first before they are contacted by their contractor, then you get to approach whichever company installed their patio for a quotation. This again only happens if you’re absolutely satisfied by the feedback obtained. No contractor is worth awarding benefit of the doubt given that they had ample resources to make the best possible looking patio for their customers.

Walk-in And Meet The Contractor

When all the suggested pre-contract phases have been completed, you should be looking to make the move to actually meeting with the contractors to discuss your project. Having a clear picture saves you from having a generic design template for basic patios imposed on your property. Since you’ve been in touch with some landscaping experts, you know just where the patio should go and how much stone material should be included to the backyard of your home to maintain a balance with nature. 

Be open about your desired outcomes and extract as much information about the project as possible. How much it is going to cost you is very important, but so is the time it will take for the project to be completed. Know how many people will be assigned to your project so you know how many handymen to expect seeing going around your property. Security is still important and you should be aware of everything, even when they should be handling this. 

Meeting more than one contractor is analogous to getting second opinions for medical concerns; different perspectives often reveal distinct variables to your project. Take note of all the different ideas that are raised throughout this stage and be sure to mention them to the final contractor for inclusion in a well thought out patio project. 

Be Involved In The Project

At this stage, your involvement will have awarded you with vast knowledge around the building of patios from the ground up, it is to your advantage not to unplug from the project. You should be involved from the moment first ground is hit right up to the finer details finish.

Be sure to have submitted your intended designs and schematics of the patio to the City Administration for a permit. You can find all the details about applying for the permit to build further structures on your property here. All construction should start after the permit has been issued, as required by law.

Your involvement should not be too much such that the professionals fail to carry out their tasks. Playing a monitoring role on a daily basis is an accepted responsibility. Not only will your presence guarantee quick recalibration of the direction of your project when something looks different from that clearly defined outcome you presented to the contractor, but you also boost productivity in the workers. Expect to see changes on a daily basis.

Like any other project that has the owner entangled with the daily developments, the end result will always say more of who you are than who did it. Your friends will be more intrigued at how you came up with the design than how much you spent or who came and did the work. It also injects an organic dose of satisfaction, knowing that you came up with an idea, and saw it turn into a real-life structure. This could well be could be the beginning of more projects that will improve your property’s value while imprinting more of your creative DNA into the final blueprints.

A Short List Of Contractors To Jumpstart The Process

Ready to start building your patio, or improving the one you already have? Here’s a short list of reputable contractors to carry out that prior mentioned due diligence as you let the idea brew.  

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