How a Multi-Trade Project Actually Runs

One point of contact, for the whole project

From signed contract to final walkthrough you have one named project manager. Not a call centre, not whoever answers, and not a different person per trade. They hold the schedule, the crew assignments, the material deliveries and the decisions, and you get their direct number at contract signing.

This is the single largest quality-of-life difference on a multi-trade job. When a homeowner has to relay information between a roofing lead and a siding lead who are not talking to each other, the homeowner becomes the project manager, and they are doing it for free with none of the information. The seam between trades is where flashing does not get integrated with siding, where a gutter run goes back up before a fascia board is replaced, and where somebody decides to solve an access problem in a way the other trade would have objected to if anyone had asked. Those seams are exactly what a single point of contact exists to close.

A written scope before anything starts

Work does not begin on a verbal understanding. Before we start you have a written scope that names the trades involved, the materials by manufacturer and product line, which areas of the property each trade will touch, how the site will be accessed and staged, the sequence of work and its expected duration, the payment schedule, and the warranty terms that apply to each portion.

The staging plan is worth reading closely rather than skimming, because it is the section that describes what will be attached to, leaned against or set on your building and your ground. If you have a question about how a crew intends to reach a second-storey gable, the time to ask it is while you are reading the scope, and it is a completely reasonable question to ask.

Anything not in the written scope is not in the price. That protects you from a number that quietly grows, and it protects us from an assumption nobody wrote down. If you want something added, it can be added — in writing, before it happens.

Change orders

Exterior work uncovers things. Sheathing under a roof turns out to be soft. A wall opens and the sill is rotted. A window opening is out of square. That is normal, and a contractor who tells you it never happens is either inexperienced or is planning to absorb it by cutting something else.

What is not normal is finding out about it on the final invoice. Our standard is that work stops on that element, we photograph what we found, we price it against the same rates as the original scope, and you decide whether to proceed. Nothing outside the signed scope is performed and billed without a written change order you have signed first. A conversation in a driveway is not a change order, and if a crew member tells you otherwise, call the project manager.

Daily site condition

The site gets cleaned at the end of every working day, not at the end of the job. On any day fasteners were handled — and on a roofing or siding job that is most days — the driveway, walkways and lawn get a magnet sweep before the crew leaves. Debris goes into a contained area rather than a pile against your fence. Landscaping and hardscape near the work zone are covered before staging goes up, and vehicles come off the driveway on delivery and tear-off days.

This is not a courtesy detail. A nail in a tyre or a child's foot is the most common avoidable injury on residential exterior work, and it comes from a site that got cleaned weekly instead of daily.

When something goes wrong

Here is a real failure mode on multi-trade exterior work, described plainly because pretending it does not exist helps nobody: siding work sometimes requires access to upper elevations, and a crew under schedule pressure can be tempted to anchor or brace staging by fastening into the roof. A penetration made through roof covering to secure scaffolding is a hole in a finished roof. If it is not properly sealed and inspected before the crew demobilises, it leaks — and it leaks into a roof the homeowner never asked anyone to touch, discovered at the next heavy rain rather than on the day it was made. It is one of the clearest examples of damage that occurs in the seam between two trades.

Our standard on this is specific rather than aspirational:

• The access and staging method is decided before the crew arrives and is written into the scope. If reaching an elevation requires anchoring to the structure, that appears in the scope you signed, with the intended anchor location and the reinstatement detail. It is not a decision left to a crew on the morning of.
• Roof-mounted anchoring is treated as roofing work, not siding work, and is performed and reinstated to roofing standards — correct fastener, correct sealant, shingle or panel reinstated over the penetration, flashing where the detail calls for it.
• Every roof penetration made for access is photographed twice: once open, once reinstated. Those photographs go into the project file and are available to you on request. A penetration nobody photographed is a penetration nobody has to account for.
• The roof is walked and checked before the crew demobilises, as a separate item on the closeout checklist rather than as part of a general tidy-up, and it is signed off by the project manager rather than by the crew that made the penetration.
• Interior ceilings below any work area are checked at final walkthrough with you present, because a stain that shows up at walkthrough is a two-hour fix and the same stain found in six weeks is an argument.

None of the above is a claim that mistakes cannot happen. It is a description of the standard we work to, and you are entitled to hold us to it in writing.

How a damage claim gets handled

1. You report it to the project manager. Any channel — call, text, email. Same day you notice it, ideally. You do not need to prove anything at this stage, or work out how it happened, or know which trade did it.
2. It gets photographed and logged before anything else. Documentation first, explanation second. The log entry records what was reported, when, and by whom, so the claim has a date that does not depend on anyone's memory.
3. Someone comes out and looks. A person with authority to make a decision, not only a crew member who has to go and ask. If the reported damage is water-related, that visit is prioritised over scheduled production work, because active water intrusion gets worse every day it waits.
4. You get a written response with a remedy and a date. Even if the answer is that it needs a specialist or an insurer involved, you get that in writing with a date attached rather than a promise to be in touch.
5. It is closed with you, not filed as closed by us. The item stays open in the project file until you confirm it is resolved. Photographs of the completed remedy go in the file alongside the original report.
6. If you are not satisfied with the outcome, it escalates to ownership, and the escalation path is published on our complaints page rather than being something you have to find out how to do.

Sequencing, so the trades do not undo each other

On a full exterior, order matters. Roof tear-off and dry-in generally precede siding so that the wall system can be integrated under the roof edge rather than butted against a finished one. Window replacement precedes siding for the same reason: the flashing and the water-resistive barrier have to lap correctly, and you cannot do that properly by retrofitting a window into a finished wall. Gutters go back last, after fascia and drip edge are sound, because hanging new gutters on rotted fascia is a repair you get to pay for twice.

Where the schedule has to deviate from that order — weather, material lead time, an inspection window — the deviation is a decision the project manager makes and tells you about, with the detail explaining how the connection will still be made correctly.

Questions about how we run projects