We answer the questions a contractor usually deflects.
Thirteen answers about money, paperwork, permits and living in the house while it is being worked on. Where we cannot answer honestly yet, the page says so instead of guessing.
- Answers here
- Thirteen, grouped in four sets
- Also on the home page
- Eight shorter ones
- Not answered yet
- Three, and the page says which
- Talk to us
- (775) 200-0648, Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM
01Money and the contract
What you sign, what you pay, and when.
The eight quick answers on the home page cover the shape of a job. These are the follow-ups people ask second.
Line items, not a lump sum. Each area of work carries its own figure, allowances are named with a dollar value beside them, and anything we could not inspect is listed as an assumption rather than quietly priced. If a lump-sum number is all you are given by anyone, ask what is inside it before you compare it to anything.
Nevada caps the initial down payment on a residential improvement contract at the lesser of $1,000 or 10 percent of the contract price, and our Terms quote that statute in full. The figure for your job is written into your contract before you sign it. After that, payments follow the draw schedule in the contract, and every draw is attached to a milestone you can look at rather than a date on a calendar.
Free estimate. We walk the property, confirm scope, and give you a written quote. There is no fee, no obligation and no deposit to receive it, and the document is yours to take to another contractor if you want a second opinion on the scope.
The draw structure is the protection. Because draws are released against completed and inspected milestones, you should never be more than one milestone ahead of the work. What happens after that is governed by the contract you signed, not by anything on this page. Read the termination and dispute sections before signing, and ask us to walk you through them if they are not clear.
02How to test any of these answers
Ask for the document, not the reassurance.
Every answer on this page is designed to be checkable, and the way to check one is to ask which document it lives in. “We handle permits” is a reassurance; “the permit set is submitted under our name and here is the application number” is a document. “We are competitive” is a reassurance; a line-item scope you can set beside another line-item scope is a document.
Four documents carry almost all of it: the line-item estimate, the drawing and selections set, the signed contract with its draw schedule, and the change order, the written and priced record of anything that changes after that contract is signed. Ask any contractor you are talking to (including us) to show you an example of each with another client’s details removed. A firm that runs on paperwork can do that in a day.
03Drawings, permits and approvals
Who draws it, who reviews it, and who has to answer for it.
Sometimes not, and we will tell you when. Drawings exist to answer two audiences: the building department, and every trade that has to build to the same idea. A like-for-like replacement usually needs neither. Anything that moves a wall, changes a load path, adds square footage or relocates plumbing needs both.
We are. We prepared the set, we built to it and we booked the inspection, so a correction notice is ours to resolve and ours to pay for when the cause is our work. Where the correction comes from something the inspector requires that nobody could have read in the approved set, it becomes a written change order like any other.
Yes. An architectural committee is a separate approval from a building permit, with its own submittal and its own timeline, and it usually has to land first. We will tell you during design whether your project needs one, what it will want to see, and how it changes the schedule, but the association approves, not us.
On us, inside the scope. Where a structural engineer is required we bring one in and their stamped detail becomes part of the permit set. Utility coordination for a service change or a relocation is scheduled the same way as any other trade. You should never be the person chasing a sign-off.
04Schedule and living in the house
The part nobody asks about until week three.
Ask on the phone and you get the real answer for the month you are calling in. We do not publish a lead time here because it changes week to week with what closes out, and a stale number on a website is the first promise a contractor breaks.
One superintendent owns your job from demolition to sign-off, and that does not rotate. The trades change by phase, because a framer is not a tile setter. We hold one schedule for every trade on the job, which is the coordination promise; we do not make claims on this page about which of them are employees.
Dust walls with zippered access, floor protection along the whole crew path, negative air where demolition warrants it, and a defined route in and out so the rest of the house is not a corridor. It is decided before demolition and written into the schedule, including which door the crew uses and where the dumpster sits.
05Three answers missing on purpose
These are the questions we will not answer from a website.
Ask them on the phone and you will get a straight answer. Publishing a guess here is how a contractor site ends up advertising something that is not true.
The contracting party and its Nevada contractor licence. Every position on this site that would carry them renders Advanced Design & Development, Inc. and 0077896A instead. When you sign, the exact legal name on the contract is the one to look up on the Nevada State Contractors Board’s public record, not a brand name, not a name on a truck. Confirm the record is active and that its classification covers the work you are buying.
The workmanship warranty. A warranty with no stated term is not something a buyer can rely on, and repeating a manufacturer’s product warranty as though it were ours would be worse. Ours is one year on our own workmanship, covering installation labour, and its terms are stated in your signed contract.
Insurance and bonding. A surety bond is on file with the Nevada State Contractors Board ($30,000, SureTec Insurance Company, bond number 6005162), and you can confirm that yourself on the Board’s public record for Advanced Design & Development, Inc., licence 0077896A, rather than taking our word for it. We are deliberately not telling you on this page that we carry general liability insurance, because a surety bond is not insurance and we have published no certificate here. The right proof is a certificate naming the carrier and the limits, sent to you by the carrier or the agent. A sentence on a website is evidence of publication, not of coverage, whoever wrote it.
06Choosing between contractors
Two questions worth asking every firm you talk to, including this one.
Usually that they are not the same scope. Before you read the numbers, line them up item by item and look for what is missing from the cheap one: permits, allowances, demolition, disposal, structural work, or the assumption that nothing is wrong behind the wall. A spread that survives that comparison is a real price difference. Most do not.
Three things. Ask who is on site when there is a problem and how fast they get there. Ask what happens to the schedule if a material is late, because something always is. And ask us to describe your job back to you in order. If the sequence comes out wrong on the phone, it will come out wrong on the house.
07Start a conversation
If your question is not here, it is probably the good one. Ask it.
The first call is not a sales call. Ask the awkward version of the question and see whether the answer arrives with a document attached to it.
Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM. A person answers, and it is somebody who has been on a job site. The form goes to the same place, one business day behind the phone.
Request received.
We will call you back within one business day to set the walkthrough. If you need us sooner than that, call (775) 200-0648 now: Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM.