Guides for Maine Homeowners

Why do these Maine contractor guides exist?

Most of what a Maine homeowner needs to know before starting a project is not published anywhere useful.

Cost information online is written for a national audience and is wrong here by a wide margin. Hiring advice is written for states that license contractors, which Maine does not. So people arrive at their first quote with no way to tell whether the number is fair and no idea what to check about the person who wrote it.

These guides are the things I end up saying on the phone. I would rather write them down once and have you arrive at the conversation already knowing them.

Where should you start?

If you read one page here, read how to hire a contractor in Maine without getting burned. It covers the whole arc, from writing down your scope before you call anybody through to the final payment, and it links out to the eight guides that go deeper on each step.

The spine of all of it is one fact that surprises almost everybody: Maine does not license general contractors. Only plumbers, electricians, land surveyors and site evaluators hold state licenses. There is no registry to look a builder up in, which changes what you should be checking.

How accurate are the cost ranges?

Every figure in the cost guides is a qualifying range rather than a quote. They are averages across hundreds of estimates, and your project will land somewhere inside them depending on your house, your town and what turns up once a wall is open.

That is the point of publishing them. A range tells you whether a project fits your budget before you spend three weeks finding out, and it tells you whether the quote in your hand is in the right neighbourhood.

What no range can do is price your specific project. Nobody can do that from a webpage, including me.

What will you not find here?

No gated downloads and no email wall. Nothing here asks for your address before it tells you something.

No fabricated statistics, no invented review counts, and no numbers I cannot stand behind. Where I do not have a reliable model for something, the guide says so plainly instead of guessing.

And no code figures. Setbacks, frost depth, egress and permit thresholds genuinely differ town to town in this state, so every guide routes those to your local code office rather than publishing a number that is wrong for most readers.

How do I actually make money?

Worth saying on a page full of free advice, because it should affect how you read it.

Contractors pay me a commission when they close work with you, and I am sometimes paid in connection with a real estate referral depending on the brokerage. You pay nothing for a referral, ever.

So my incentive is that a project happens. Which is exactly why the most useful thing I do is often telling somebody their budget does not match their plan, before they spend a month finding out the expensive way. Read everything here with that in mind.