If you plan on living in the house during construction, this section is for you. If not, feel free to skip it:)

Sit down with your contractor and discuss the rules of your house. Be sure he/she understands the importance of these rules. Print them out. Post them all over your house.

1. Staging the work. The way a construction project should occur while living in the house is staging the job such that there is always a liveable area of the house. This means that rooms under construction should be partitioned by a thick plastic barrier at the very least. This is especially important if your home was built before 1978, because of EPA lead paint testing requirements (Fulcrum Properties entirely ignored this one). Super thin painters' drop cloth grade plastic will not do the trick as we found out while working with Fulcrum. Vents should be covered such that dust is not traveling to different rooms all over the house. Although our kitchen was not under construction, this picture is how I found my stove many nights during the project. I would have to clean my kitchen over and over and over again. And this is not what we were promised. But that old scope of work didn't specify this, we had only discussed this at length verbally. Again, don't make this mistake.

2. Wood floors need to be protected at the beginning of the job. Our floors were not covered until the very end stages of the project. Workman walked in the backyard with their dirty boots and construction debris and then walked right into our house. When moving furniture, the floors were not protected. We have huge three foot scratch marks where an armoire was moved. At the tail end of the project Fulcrum placed plastic on our stairs and paper on our floors, but that did little good. We've learned from other contractors that you need to place wood down on wood to truly protect it. In the end, we had to have our floors refinished, and trust me that it was a fight to have our contractor pay for it.

3. Close and lock the doors. This may seem kind of silly, but we only bring it up because Fulcrum had a hard time with this one. I worked from home for quite a bit during the construction project, I had to get up every few minutes or what felt like every few minutes to close the door to the 30 degree winter weather outside. The workers just couldn't close doors after themselves, another indicator that they were used to working in vacant homes, not when a family lived in one. When I went into the office, I would come home to the doors unlocked and wide open, in the winter. And this was during a time where a string of robberies occurred in our neighborhood. I would be with my children and wonder. "had I just been robbed, was I being robbed right now? Why were the doors wide open in the winter, much less unlocked?" Not a contractor in sight.

4. Protect your furniture. Fulcrum rarely protected our furniture and if they did, they used a painter grade thin plastic to do so. Because of this, we experienced damage to a cherished buffet, a chair from my childhood, a glass coffee table, and a vase from our wedding. This goes back to the idea of staging. So if construction will occur in a room, a contractor needs to let the owner know or prepare the room for the construction, but something needs to be communicated. We assumed, wrongly, that Fulcrum would protect our things that were too heavy for us to move. We moved most everything else out of the way, minus the vase. Be sure you are on the same page with your contractor on this one as much of the damage we experienced can't be repaired.

5. Other. Microwave use, smoking, using the bathroom. Decide how you feel about contractors using your microwave, smoking in your yard and disposing of the butts on your lawn, using your bathroom. These are all personal choices that need to be communicated with your contractor. Again, this seems terribly silly doesn't it, but talk about it and put it in writing.