… Home-repair crisis averted

If you can't prevent a home repair crisis, the best you can do in advance is to know the tradesmen you can trust, or at least how to find one. The Better Business Bureau of Southern Arizona maintains a free list of accredited businesses. The rating is based on the number of complaints and how they were handled.

The Arizona Registrar of Contractors maintains a public list of contractors, their license status, how long they have been licensed, and information on complaints open and closed, including those that were resolved, withdrawn, resulted in discipline or were affected by a contractor's bankruptcy.

Know good tradesmen

Make your own emergency services list by trading names with friends and neighbors who have experience with specific firms or individual tradesmen.

Better yet, use your experience with quality tradesmen who've done your home's preventive maintenance during less critical moments. Besides possibly avoiding some emergencies, their routine maintenance work will give you a better idea of their workmanship than comparing the size of ads in a crisis.

Also, when a freak storm hits blowing off roofs or a snap hard freeze bursts pipes all over the city, contractors can be backed up for days or even weeks. So, it can't hurt to call a company with whom you're already a customer in good standing.

"A lot of times what happens is if I've got a customer, if something happens, even if I can't get out there right away (to do the repair), I might be able to put a band-aid on it to buy a little time until I can get out and do a repair," says Mike Blass, owner of Blass Roofing.

Consider a restoration firm

And when he's too swamped, Blass said he recommends calling a company like Better Way Services, one of several emergency and restoration services companies that do whatever needs to be done, quickly.

"They'll even take your furniture out of your house and put it in storage," says Blass. "If there's a storm or broken waterline, whatever, a home and some kind of catastrophe, day or night, I don't care, they send somebody out. ... "

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... Home-repair crisis averted