My crew got pulled onto a commercial job in November. 17 weeks, $43k.

The detail that stops me is the building inspector recommendation. That's normally treated as the gold standard reference and it didn't tell you anything about capacity or priority. He knew the work was good. He didn't know where you'd sit in their queue.

How far were you from the house? You said a neighbor called you. I'm asking because I'm looking at a similar situation, rural property a few hours out, and I've been assuming I could manage a rehab remotely with photos. Your November sounds like the answer to that.

Two hours of a plumber's time draining the system would have been maybe $300 and it's the whole $19,200. That's the part I'll remember.

That owner made a rational call, and I say that from the other side of the job, running a small crew myself. A hotel deadline has liquidated damages attached to it. Your farmhouse had nothing attached to it. Given a choice between a penalty clause and a patient landowner, he was always going to leave.

That's not a defense of him. He should have winterized before he walked, and leaving a house open in November is a failure regardless of where his crew went. But the reason you got picked last is that you were the cheapest client to disappoint. Anyone hiring a crew that also does commercial should assume they're third in line unless something in the contract says otherwise.

@cobalt is right about the incentive and I'd go further. The fix isn't a penalty clause, because you'll never enforce a penalty against a five man outfit worth suing. The fix is progress payments tied to physical milestones with nothing paid ahead.

@orchard's $23,400 deposit is the actual root of it. Once the crew has 30 percent and has delivered maybe 25 percent of value, they're square and they owe you nothing they feel. Pay materials direct to the supplier if you're worried about pricing. Same protection against lumber moves, none of the exposure.

The frozen pipe is downstream. The reason the house sat nine weeks is that leaving cost them nothing.

Would your insurance not have covered the water damage? Vacant properties under renovation usually need a specific builder's risk or vacancy policy, and standard homeowner coverage often excludes freeze damage on an unheated vacant house. Curious what you had and whether it responded, because a lot of people reading this are probably carrying the wrong policy without knowing.

@tender that's the question I came to ask. $19,200 is a lot to eat if a $1,400 policy would have taken it.

I've run crews and I disagree slightly with @thatch on where this broke. The deposit is a real problem but it's a money problem and money problems get recovered from.

The project-killing decision was opening the entire first floor at once. On a 1926 house with plaster, you take one section, rough it, close it, move. Nobody does the whole floor in one pass except when the crew is trying to compress their own labor into fewer mobilizations, which is exactly what a crew does when they know they're about to get pulled somewhere else.

He may already have known about the hotel job in week 5. Opening everything at once let him bill for demo across the whole house before he left.

@orchard, was the demo billed as one line or in phases?

Nine weeks is nothing. I had a framer vanish for four months on a townhouse and the only thing that got him back was that I still owed him $11k and he knew he'd never see it otherwise. Retainage is the only language that works.

Also @orchard, no offense but a 1926 farmhouse in a rural county at $78k budget was always going to be $110k+. Those houses have three surprises in them minimum.

Let me put actual numbers on @flint's point because I think it changes the story.

$78,000 on 1,900 square feet is $41 a foot on a 1926 structure going down to studs on the whole first floor. New roof, six windows, full rewire, full replumb. I don't think that budget was ever real, freeze or no freeze.

Strip out the $19,200 of water damage and remediation and the project came in at $102,200, which is $54 a foot. That's a normal number for that scope. So $24,200 of the $43,400 overrun looks like an estimating miss that was baked in at day one, and $19,200 is the crew failure.

That matters because the lessons are different. Better contract terms fix the second one. Nothing about the contract fixes the first.

@ledger's split is the most useful thing in the thread. Two separate failures and everyone has been arguing about which one is the cause.

I'll ask the thing I'd have been embarrassed to ask. When the owner said "three weeks" in week 8, what could @orchard actually have done that day? Not in hindsight. That day, with the house open and one crew in a rural county and winter coming.

Because the answers so far are all about the contract you sign in July. I want to know what the November move is.

@compass the November move is you spend $2,000 that week. Get a plumber out to drain and blow the lines, get plastic and a couple of construction heaters in, and buy the house being closed up for the winter. You lose the season and you keep the structure. It's not satisfying but it's available to anyone with a phone and two grand.

On the documents, since that's what I pay attention to. A suspension clause is what was missing. Language that says if work stops for more than 10 consecutive working days, the owner may engage others to complete or secure the property and offset the cost against amounts owed. It sounds like boilerplate and it's the difference between calling another plumber in November and worrying you're breaching your own agreement by doing so.

Whether that clause is enforceable and how it interacts with mechanics lien rights depends on your state, so have a construction attorney where the property sits draft it. But every rehab agreement I've read that was worth reading has some version of it, and @orchard's clearly didn't.

Scope creep is my usual subject so I'll note the one that isn't in this post. After a remediation contractor opens up a sill plate on a 1926 house, they find things. @orchard, did the $19,200 stay at $19,200 or did that number grow once they were in there? Every water job I've had turned into a second job.

Also @girder's point about billing demo in one pass is sharp and I hadn't considered it. I've seen crews front-load demo because it's the easiest thing to show progress on and the hardest to un-do.

The thing I take from this as someone who wants no second job is that remote rehab management isn't passive at any price. @anchor asked the right question and nobody really answered it. If you're two hours away you need somebody local whose job is to walk the property weekly, and that costs money you have to budget on day one.

Rural low price point is my whole market and the crew depth problem is worse than most of this thread assumes. In my county there are maybe four crews who can do a full gut and two of them are always on commercial. When one walks, there is no second phone number to call. @orchard's last line about having another contractor lined up is good advice in a metro and close to impossible where I am.

What I've ended up doing is smaller phases. I don't open more than I can close myself with two guys and a weekend if everything goes wrong. Slower and it costs more per foot, but I've never had a house sit open through a winter.