Are you looking for ways to reduce the cost of home repair or improvements to your home or maybe even do it yourself?  You’ll find useful information and some links to great home improvement related information here. I started my first handyman business in New Jersey in 2005 after a 25 years in the corporate world in the printing and packaging fields. Advertising my business in the very rural area I lived in was literally as simple as posting a simple flyer in the local grocery store. It’s funny really, and this actually happened, when I got home from the grocery store, my phone was blinking. The message was from a guy who wanted me to install a digital thermostat in his house. I ended up doing several jobs for him and he was a loyal customer until I left Jersey to come back home to Texas.

I moved my business to the Dallas area under a different, more universal name. In Dallas, finding a reliable handyman can be a challenge. The competition is fierce and the types of contractors in Dallas varies about as widely as the number of jobs there are to be had. I started hanging flyers on doors in the neighborhood, which worked okay for awhile, but it was a time-consuming and ineffective. Word of mouth helped a little. Then there was the guy who called me and offered to optimize my primary website. For a mere $3600.00 per year, his company would guarantee 60 hits on my website per month. I only needed to sign up for two years…wow! I asked him if he was kidding. He wasn’t.

There are a lot of contractors in Dallas. Good ones. I don’t have a brick and mortar business, but I am knowledgeable, fast, reasonably priced and trustworthy. I guarantee my work, I don’t advertise, have very little overhead and can handle a wide variety of handyman jobs myself at a fraction of what major contractors charge. I can’t and shouldn’t try to compete with the major contractors since I’m not one, and can’t live working for minimum wage.

So I started this blog. The way I see it, in Dallas, you can hire the lowest priced bidder and get the lowest quality of work with no guarantee (or worse), get lucky, or spend a lot of money. You can get the job done right, get it done quickly, get a real guarantee, and help pay your contractors overhead. In the back of your mind, you really wish you knew how to do the job yourself or had the time to do it, because you also know that your contractor is passing his excess costs on to you.

I’m sure you can state exceptions. There are always exceptions. I’m just commenting on the whole. Anyway, my goal here is to deliver some home improvement tips, techniques and ideas for home improvement, home repair and home maintenance and help you find the right person or company to do the job right for a reasonable cost.

Philip Vandermeer – Owner of Thousand Hills Properties in Dallas, Texas

Thousand Hills Properties