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Today I continued some work on my house to prepare it for renting out or selling. To speed up the process, I put an ad on craigslist to see if I might be able to find someone else who could help me along the way. I was surprised to get a slew of calls from various people in the Nashville area looking for work. My phone rang every minute for probably 3 or 4 hours, and never stopped until I took the ad off the website.
Pretty soon, I had a guy coming to take a look at the house who made an offer of $300 to do the work. Now, I’m certainly not an expert, but I’ve been renovating this house since I bought it and I know that the cost of this project is worth far more than that. I’d say that there is probably about 60 hours of work here, which means that a typical contractor would charge me anywhere from $45-65/hr. That means that I should be looking at a job of somewhere between $2500 and $4000, and that’s just for labor only! So, as you might guess, I was amazed when this guy offered to do the work for so little.
Since I let the guy start working, he’s done a great job, and I’ve found out a little about his life situation along the way. The truth is, here’s a guy who has fallen victim to the current state of our economy. It’s so unfortunate. His life has been so rough lately that it had me so moved. I offered to have him do the job and, depending on the quality of work, I’ll bump up the price to help him out. Crazy, huh?