After meeting a bunch of different types of trades at the Seattle Home Show, we also realized that we needed to research builders before even wasting our time on interviews. The first step in doing that is checking them out at Washington State’s Department of Labor & Industries. It’s a great resource to use to check out anyone that may work on your home (general contractor or not). The website lists the following things that you can look into:

• Verify a contractor’s registration, bond, insurance, and infractions;
• Check to see if they’re licensed;
• Find out their worker’s comp status;
• Look up their safety inspection history and violations; and
• Track a contractor

They also have an interactive sister website to help with making sure that you hire and work with contractors smartly called ProtectMyHome. They include links for step-by-step hiring guides, you can verify contractor’s registration, research common contractor problem, avoid scams and report any frauds.

We looked up all 5 of the contractors that we interviewed on these websites as well as researched things to do for hiring a contractor. It’s a good resource and I’m sure that we’ll be referencing it throughout our build (let’s just hope it’s not to report any problems or frauds).