Six things you can check, instead of four you cannot.
Every contractor claims quality workmanship and attention to detail. None of it is verifiable. Here is how we actually work, including the parts that are not flattering.
Every contractor’s website says the same four things: quality workmanship, attention to detail, on time and on budget, treat your home like our own. None of it is checkable, which is why none of it is worth anything to you.
So here are the things about how we work that you can actually verify, including the ones that are not flattering.
1. We publish the whole build, not just the finished room
Every project on this site is documented from the estimate visit through the structural work to the final walk. Not a gallery of finished kitchens — the dig, the rebar, the pour, the shoring, the pipe in the wall.
That is deliberate, and it is uncomfortable. Process photography shows you the parts of a job where things can be done badly and nobody would ever know. Underpinning an existing foundation in sequence. Steel shoring under a house with its walls removed. A brick ranch with its roof off.
Ask any contractor you are considering to show you what was behind the walls on their last three jobs. The answer, and how quickly it comes, is informative.
2. The structural work is ours, not a subcontractor’s
Most remodelling companies subcontract anything load-bearing. That is not dishonest, but it changes what happens when something is discovered: the person who priced your job, the person who engineered it and the person swinging the hammer are three different companies who did not write each other’s scope, and you become the messenger between them.
We do load-bearing removal, engineered beams, shoring, underpinning and new foundations under standing houses ourselves. When something turns up behind the plaster, it is our problem to solve rather than yours to referee.
3. We answer every review, including the bad one
AAA has replied to 14 of 14 reviews on our Google profile. That includes the critical one.
We are not going to pretend we have never let anyone down. What we will say is that a contractor’s response to criticism in public is a reasonable proxy for how they behave in private, and that is something you can go and check right now without taking our word for anything.
A note on review counts. Our Google profile is a genuine one with a modest number of reviews. If a contractor’s site shows a suspiciously round rating over a very large review count, it is worth clicking through to the actual profile. Ours is not the biggest number you will see on a Front Range contractor’s website. It is a real one.
4. We turn work down
We will tell you to use somebody else if:
- Your project is genuinely cosmetic — paint, flooring, a run of cabinets, no walls moving. A specialist will do it faster and cheaper than we can.
- It is single-trade work. Same reason.
- It is emergency repair or insurance restoration. Different business, different response model.
- You are outside the Denver Front Range service area — and we will say so on the first call rather than after a site visit.
- The budget and the scope genuinely cannot meet. We will explain where the gap is instead of designing something you were never going to build.
A general contractor who says yes to everything is telling you something about how they price and who they subcontract to.
5. One contract, and the address decides the first conversation
We are design-build, which means design, engineering, permitting and construction sit under one agreement. That is not automatically better than hiring an architect and bidding the drawings — it is a different trade-off. What it buys you is that cost feedback arrives while decisions are still cheap to change, and that nobody can hand a discovery back to you as somebody else’s problem.
It is also why our estimate form asks for your address before it asks about your project. Which building department reviews your job determines a great deal about what is permittable and how long approval takes, and that is a far more useful first conversation than a ballpark price.
6. Toby built his own house the same way
Toby Hertel has owned AAA for 25 years. The mountain home in Leadville documented on this site is his own, at just over ten thousand feet.
It is the only project in our portfolio where every decision — where to spend, where to refuse to, what to treat as non-negotiable — was made with no client in the room. It carries no testimonial, and it cannot. That is precisely what makes it worth looking at.
What none of this proves
It proves nothing about your project. It gives you five or six things you can check, which is more than a page of adjectives gives you. Apply the same test to everyone you are considering, including us: show me the structural work, tell me who is on site every day, show me a change order, and give me a reference from three years ago rather than last month.
Want to test any of this?
Ask us to show you the structural work on a recent job, or tell us about your project and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right company for it.
Or call (720) 637-2060