Working in a customer’s home

The best approach is to treat the customer’s home as if it was your own home.  Be on time.  If you can’t be on time, call ahead and update the customer with your new arrival time.  Now this doesn’t mean calling the customer at 7:50am and tell them you will be an hour late when your appointment time is 8:00am.  Be reasonable.  Two things that really upset the customer are being late and being a no show.

Customer’s often take time off work to be home to allow you access to their residence to complete the work.  Without proper notification the customer can become very irritated and no matter how good your work is, they will still be upset and can leave you a bad review.

Cover up your work area.  This includes the walls, the floors, and especially the furniture.  The last thing you want is a mess in their residence.  Cleanliness is godliness.  If you really want to piss off a customer, just ignore what I said. I personally don’t like getting my ass chewed off so buy lots of tape, plastic, and tarps.  Now if you have dirty tarp, the last thing you want to do is use it to cover up a nice couch or a nice bed. It may be suitable to put on the floor where you’re painting but trust me the last thing you want to do is put a dirty old paint riddled tarp on somebody’s beautiful couch or a lovely bedspread.

Bring all types of cleaning materials with you.  Cleaning solutions, brooms, mops, vacuum cleaner, dust rags, and more.  If you are working with drywall, you may want to invest in sanding devices that have vacuum attachments. Make sure you ask lots of questions like what sink can you use, what garden hose can you use.  Don’t wash out your paint brushes in a customer sink, or bathtub.  Take them home and clean them out at home.  If you have to mix drywall mud, make sure you don’t wash out the drywall mud in the customers driveway, yard, or flower beds.  You are probably thinking, where in the hell do I go?  Just talk with the customer.  If they say no to all of the above, just take it home and do it at home.  Now if you don’t want repeat business from this customer then by all means just ignore what I said.  Oh, that goes for referrals too. 

When you finish the work and clean up, the best thing to do is to complete a walk through with the customer and review everything together.  Pay attention to the customer. Take notes.  If there is a punch list, you want to document that punch list and have the customer sign off on it.  The reason why this is so important is that you don’t want to complete the punch list only to have the customer come up with a new punch list after finish it.  Believe me, it will happen. 

Don't be surprised if they tell you things look fine and then they call the owner and complain. This is human nature. The customer feels like it will be better heard and responded to by the owner rather than the worker.