The most expensive mistakes on a renovation usually happen before any work starts — at the moment you decide who to hire. The warning signs are typically visible before anything is signed, if you know which questions to ask and what a bad answer sounds like.
Salem Builders is a licensed general contractor based in Winston-Salem, working across Clemmons, Lewisville, Bermuda Run, and Advance. These are the seven questions we’d tell any homeowner to ask any contractor — including us — before signing anything, along with what a good answer sounds like and what should make you walk away.
In North Carolina, general contractors are licensed through the NC Licensing Board for General Contractors, and the board maintains a public license search anyone can use. A legitimate contractor will hand over their license number without hesitation. Ours is L.86773, and you’re welcome to verify it before we ever step on your property.
Walk away if: they dodge the question, say the license is “in a partner’s name,” or tell you the job is small enough that licensing “doesn’t really matter.” Licensing requirements can depend on the size and type of the project, but a contractor who leads with reasons you shouldn’t check is telling you something important about how the rest of the project will go.
Ask for proof of general liability coverage, which protects your property if something is damaged — and ask how worker injuries are covered, since crews can be structured differently from one company to the next. A professional outfit can provide a certificate of insurance on request without any friction. Salem Builders carries full general liability and workers’ compensation on every project.
Walk away if: you get a verbal “yeah, we’re covered” with nothing in writing. Insurance only matters after something has gone wrong — which is exactly the wrong moment to discover a policy lapsed. Depending on the circumstances, an incident involving an uninsured crew on your property can turn into a dispute you never signed up for. Ask for the certificate up front; a professional expects the request.
This is the question that exposes the most problems later. Some bids that look cheap are written loose on purpose: a vague scope, allowances set low, and language that lets the price climb through change orders once your kitchen is torn open and you have no practical way to switch contractors.
Ask directly: “If I don’t change anything about the scope, can the price change?” We work on fixed-price contracts — no change orders unless you add scope. Not every good contractor prices this way, but every good contractor can explain exactly what is and isn’t included in the number, and what specific events would change it.
Walk away if: the answer is some version of “we’ll figure it out as we go.” On a full renovation, “figure it out as we go” is how a budget grows well past the original bid.
One of the most common complaints homeowners raise about a bad project isn’t shoddy work — it’s silence. Weeks with no crew on site, no returned calls, no idea whether the project is on track. Communication isn’t a soft skill in construction; it’s how you find out about problems while they’re still small.
Ask who your point of contact is, and how often you’ll get updates without having to chase them. Our answer: a written update with photos every Friday, on every project, whether it’s a bathroom in Winston-Salem or a whole-home renovation out in Davie County. You should never wonder what happened on your project this week.
Walk away if: there’s no defined update rhythm at all. “Call me anytime” sounds friendly, but it quietly shifts the job of communication onto you.
Every contractor promises a timeline. The revealing question is what happens when the timeline slips — because on a badly run project, the answer is: nothing. The schedule was a sales tool, not a commitment, and the cost of every delayed week lands on you.
Listen for whether the contractor has any skin in the game. We put an On-Time Completion Guarantee in writing: if the project runs past the agreed completion date for reasons within our control, $500 per week comes off the final invoice. We can offer that because our on-time completion rate is 97%, verified by client survey — but the point of the question isn’t to find that exact guarantee. It’s to find out whether the schedule means anything.
Walk away if: the question clearly irritates them. You’re not asking for a guarantee — you’re asking whether the schedule is a commitment or a sales tool, and how a contractor handles that question is itself part of the answer.
Photos are easy to come by. What you actually want is recent, local, verifiable work: projects in communities like yours, with homeowners who’ll take a phone call. That matters here more than in most markets, because Triad housing stock varies so much. A 1940s brick home near Ardmore or Buena Vista — plaster walls, crawl-space foundation, decades of past modifications — is a very different renovation than a newer build in one of Bermuda Run’s golf-course communities. You want evidence the contractor has done work like yours, recently, nearby.
Check the contractor’s Google reviews and read the recent ones, not just the star number. You can see our track record on our reviews page — a 5.0-star Google rating across 39 reviews, built across 136+ projects since 2021.
Walk away if: every reference is old, out of the area, or “confidential.” Happy recent clients are a contractor’s best marketing; if none are available, ask yourself why.
A professional contract protects both sides, and a good contractor will walk you through it line by line without being asked twice. Before you sign, you should understand the full scope of work in writing, the payment schedule and what triggers each payment, how change orders are handled and priced, what’s excluded, and how the project formally ends.
Two things deserve particular attention. First, permits: requirements vary by scope and jurisdiction, so the contract should clearly state who will confirm, pull, and close out any permits and inspections the project needs — and a contractor who floats skipping permits “to save you time” is a walk-away sign on its own. Second, the deposit: practices vary by contractor and project type, but be cautious about any unusually large upfront payment relative to work performed. Payments should generally track progress — you’re paying for work as it happens, not funding someone else’s last project.
Walk away if: there’s no written contract at all, or you’re being pressured to sign on the spot to “lock in a price.” A fair price will survive a few days of thinking it over.
Every question above gets more important as the scope grows. On the larger renovations and additions we see in Clemmons, Advance, Lewisville, and Bermuda Run, the gap between a professional and a problem contractor isn’t measured in hundreds of dollars — it’s measured in months of your life. Bigger scopes mean more trades to coordinate, more inspections to pass, and more room for a loosely written contract to go wrong. Ten minutes of direct questions before signing costs you nothing and can save you a project’s worth of regret.
We wrote this list knowing we’d be answering it. That’s the point: a contractor who publishes the hard questions isn’t afraid of them.
If you’re planning a renovation, addition, or kitchen or bath remodel anywhere in our service area — Winston-Salem, Clemmons, Lewisville, Bermuda Run, Advance, and surrounding Forsyth and Davie County communities — request a free on-site consultation. We respond within 2 hours, we’ll give you straight answers to all seven questions, and you’ll get a fixed price in writing before any work begins. Fair warning: we’re typically booked 4–6 weeks out, so if you have a timeline in mind, the conversation is worth starting early.