I can recall an evening, many years ago, when we hosted another family at our home. We love this family, and to this day, we’re close friends with them. But this family consisted of two parents and three boys. And these boys were, well, boys. They were energetic, loud, and all-in-all quite a handful. (They’ve matured into fine young men, by the way!)
Toward the end of the evening, we heard the dreaded sound of silence. And any parent knows that when an unruly group of boys goes quiet, it’s not right.
We all rushed into the bedroom and one of the boys had climbed to the top of the closet insert like it was a ladder, another had removed 100% of the contents from 100% of the furniture pieces, and the third was so very proud of himself because he had fed the fish. Hand lotion. (Fish did not survive the meal.)
So when it comes to treating a home with care and concern, I can’t help but remember that night and how I, as the homeowner, felt a bit violated by these little angels.
Our homes are quite an intimate place, are they not?
It’s where we raise our family, host our guests, break bread, laugh, cry, celebrate, and mourn. Yes, it’s probably the most important space in our daily life.
So it’s understandable to be a bit nervous about opening our homes to strangers. And we get this. This is why our third of three core values at kitchen & bath CRATE is “remarkable responsibility.”
Quite simply, “remarkable responsibility” means we treat your home as if it were our own. Here are a few specific ways we do so:
- At your pre-construction meeting (we call it a “Launch Meeting”), your project manager covers an assortment of topics with you, from pets to working hours to parking, to be sure we’re operating in the most convenient way possible for your day-to-day life.
- We arrive on time, every day, and make sure we communicate arrival time with you in a manner of your choosing.
- Before we commence demolition, we fully enclose your project work area with plastic and use fans to create negative air pressure, reducing significantly the amount of dust entering the rest of your home.
- We use an assortment of materials and methods to protect your flooring from foot traffic or items that may accidentally drop.
- Our team always knocks and waits before using the key in the lockbox. No one likes to be surprised in their own home!
- When moving appliances, we wrap them carefully and use specialty moving equipment like air sleds and lifting straps.
- Much like visiting a national park, we abide by a “leave no trace” mantra. So no one will be washing out tile grout buckets in your planters!
There are many more ways in which we treat your home as if it were our own. After all, you deserve remarkable, and that’s what we strive to deliver.
I’m excited for you as you begin your remodel journey. We’re here to help. Ready to take the next step? Click here to schedule a phone call with our team!
All the best,
Scott Monday
Founder, kitchen & bath CRATE
Start Transcript
“Okay, Scott Monday with Kitchen and Bath Crates, and today I want to talk with you about a pain point that we’ve heard a lot over the years, and it’s the pain point of contractors or vendors working in your home but not treating your home with respect. Really, what they’re not doing is they’re not treating your home as if it were their own. We’ve heard lots of different things about contractors leaving a mess, not arriving on time, really just doing things. If you had a guest in your home that did these things, you’d be quite upset. So why would you ever let your contractor treat your home that way?
So let me tell you a few things that we do a little bit different at Kitchen and Bath Crates. First of all, we conduct a launch meeting for you, and during that launch meeting, we have this agenda here. We talk through your project schedule, which I mentioned in a past video. We talk through your project data sheet, which I also mentioned. And we walk through an assortment of different questions that cover things like arrival time and working hours, access to the home, how to treat your pets and make sure that we’re taking care of them during the process, path of travel to the job site, all sorts of little nuances of the project that are really important to go over before construction even begins.
Now, the next thing we do to respect you and your home is we arrive on time. We’ve all been in that situation where the cable company gives us the four or eight-hour window, and it can be so frustrating to wait around, just not knowing when someone’s going to arrive. 7:30 a.m. is when we start our projects, and on any day that we’re going to be later than that because of an intentional situation that needs to be addressed, we communicate with you the day before so you know exactly when to expect our team.
Next up, a way that we protect your home is through dust control. A really important part of that is making sure that we put up plastic walls with a lot of different hardware we use to make sure the plastic stays up. And another part of that dust control is this fan system we set up. Now, this is just the fan component, but usually, there’s also ductwork involved, and what we do is we create what we call negative pressure with these fans, and we pull air into the home, into the work area, and then we shoot it out a door or a window, and that creates what we call negative pressure, so it pulls dust into the job site and out the door or window.
Another thing that we do is we make sure to protect your floor with either this, which is called RAM board, which is kind of a cardboard fibrous type of floor covering material, or we even protect your home with masonite, which is a much thicker material that’s really good to go over things like hardwood floors.
So those are just some of the things that we do on your project to make sure that we treat it with the utmost respect. We sort of follow the same mantra that you would at a national park, where our goal is to leave no trace. We don’t want any trace that we’ve been working there on the job other than in the actual job site itself and our beautiful crate out front. So that’s how we treat your home with respect. Thanks so much for listening. All right, buh-bye.”
