Our refined carpenters can make wood work for you

We can connect you with up to 3 skilled carpenters perfectly suited to plane through your particular carpentry project.

Our experienced home pros are carpenters by trade. For years, they have been building walls and fences, kitchen cupboards, built-in cupboards, decking, skirting, cornices and eaves. They intrinsically understand wood, and how to work it beautifully.

Carpentry projects we handle:

How to hire the right carpenter

Woodwork or carpentry is a very specialised skill. Few people have the aptitude or proficiency to do this well. Sure, everyone knows which end of the saw to hold or how to bang in a nail, but being able to deliver an end product that is worthy of public display in a house or office is quite another matter.

But wood and wooden finishes in a house can be very special. Be it a built-in cupboard, floating shelves or a wooden staircase, finding the right person to do the work can be very difficult. How do you find somebody with the experience, the tools and the skill to do a proper job? It can be a nightmare field to negotiate. So, to help you make it through the process here are a few pointers to help you along the way.

Do they belong to a trade body?

Not all carpenters belong to a trade body. There might be some who are members of the Master Builders’ Association or one of its affiliates, and this is a great place to start. But there are many smaller home pros who are not affiliated in such a way. If this is a case see if you can find somebody who is endorsed in some other way.

At Fix Forwardm, we specialise in both vetting and training of small independent home pros. It is not quite the same as a Master Builder’s affiliation but it is still an endorsement that says the specific carpenter can do what he says he can. We will also never recommend somebody for a job for which they are not suited or equipped.

We want our home pro to succeed and we want you to be happy with the people we supply – it is not in anyone’s interests if we put forward candidates who are not going to give you anything than a world-class service.

References for carpenter hire

There is nothing quite as robust as a personal recommendation. So, ask around amongst your friends and family to see who has a carpenter that they are willing to recommend. You will almost certainly receive some solid leads from people who live in the same suburb as you.

What this means is that aside from the recommendation, you can easily pop around to their house to view the work that was done for them to assess if it is up to the standards that you expect.

In terms of gathering references another good option is to ask the carpenters you talk with to supply you with a list of references and some pictures of their work. Make sure that they are able to proffer a few references and that some of them are relatively recent. You don’t want to hire somebody whose references are all five years older or more.

Carpentry home pro costs

It probably goes without saying, but never pay for the job in full in advance. A deposit is both fair and appropriate, especially if there are upfront material costs that your carpenter is expected to outlay. But thereafter you need to make sure that you are both on the same page.

If the job is relatively small then you should expect to pay the balance on completion of the work – as long as it is done to your satisfaction. If it is a bigger job that is going to take place over a longer period (a week or more), then you might want to agree milestone payments.

This means that you pay a percentage of the agreed fee each time a milestone is hit. That way the carpenter is incentivised to keep moving forward while you are only paying for work that has been completed.

Consider a few candidates

In the same way that you wouldn’t advertise for a job and only interview one candidate, so too should you not only speak to one home pro ahead of asking them to do a job. Speak to at least two different people, ideally more, so that you are able to compare prices. It will also allow you to talk through the job and hear perspective from differing carpenters to see how they propose completing the work.

You might find that one person proposes doing things in a completely different way to another and that there are price, material or end product differences as a result.

And a contract is always a good idea. The bigger the job the more important it is to have a contract in place. For sure, if you just need somebody to fix the base on your birdfeeder or repair the roof to your dog’s kennel, then a contract is overkill.

But if the job is a little more complex and involved – perhaps the installation of wooden staircase or the creation of a deck – then make sure that you don’t proceed on the basis of a handshake and a smile. It might feel good when you give the go ahead, but if expectations are not aligned or there is a misunderstanding somewhere along the line, then without a contract you are in for the world of pain and money.