Are you planning on using friends or family members to save money on your home project? Before jumping in, make sure you understand the pros and cons and how to have a successful outcome.

While working with family members might seem like a good idea, it can often lead to challenging and uncomfortable situations or even potentially hurt relationships. When evaluating whether to use friends or family for your home project, understanding the good, the bad, and the ugly that may come of it and what to you can do to ensure a positive outcome will help you feel more confident about your decision.

Many times, people who want to build a new home or renovate their existing home want to use friends or family members (or friends-of-friends or friends-of-family). Their reasons are either to:

• help them get it done for less money
• in less time
• or with more flexibility
• or any combination of these options

If you’re planning on using friends or family as designers, builders, or tradespeople, here are some words of caution and some helpful tips.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Hiring Friends and Family

Before choosing to go one way or the other in terms of hiring friends and family, it’s crucial to consider the pros and cons. Thinking critically about your project goals and needs beforehand can help you forecast whether or not hiring family members or friends is the right move for your project.

Let’s take a look at the ways a personal hire can go right or wrong.

The Good

There are several obvious benefits to hiring a family member or close friend.

Before they even start working, you probably already have a good idea of what their strengths, abilities, and skill sets are and how they can be used to the advantage of your project.

Personal connections can be a great way to get good quality help on your project, especially when you lack the knowledge or skills to do it yourself. They become a sort of advisor to you, and given that you already know they’re capacities and expertise, you can rest assured that you’re getting sound advice.

An added bonus is that, given your personal relationship with them, you might not have to run a background check and already know the quality of their character. You’ve already personally vetted them and have a good gut feeling about whether they would be a good investment or not.

The Bad

There’s also a chance that the friend or family member you choose to hire might take advantage of you or the situation.

Working with family or friends is often a more casual working environment. Expectations will vary. When you hire friends and family they may expect some latitude in professional and personal freedoms that they would not expect in normal working relationships. Schedule slipping, not prioritizing the work, or making decisions that you would normally make are just a few potential expectations.

Many times, family and friends may not look at agreements, commitments, and deadlines as absolute. They often look at them more as suggestions. The end result is that it may end up costing you if you’ve trusted important work to them that they let fall through the cracks.

Also if your friend is constantly late or your family member has no time-management skills, hiring him or her won’t change that. It will only bring those issues into the project. At the same time, if you’re looking at hiring your buddy who complains all the time and doesn’t have a strong work ethic, you’re going to have a big problem on your hands.

I’m not saying this always happens, but it is more likely to happen than if you would hire a professional that you didn’t know because deep down your family member knows that they’re not your everyday hire.

The Ugly

If hiring someone with whom you have a personal relationship ends badly, it could very easily cause damage that persists long after the project is over. Your personal relationship with that person may never be the same again. You could lose a friendship or have an estranged relationship with the family member.

Terminating the working relationship is never an easy interaction, and it’s even more uncomfortable when you have a personal history with the person you’re letting go. What would it be like at the next family get-together if you had recently terminated their services?

What To Ask Yourself Before Hiring Friends and Family

I’ve heard that the only time it’s a bad decision to hire family or friends is if they’re skill set and personality aren’t a fit for the job.

If you have friends or family members who are great at what they do and would bring valuable skill sets to your project, you should consider hiring them the same as you would an unknown person who has that value.

With that being said, it is a tricky process to navigate. It’s unlike other hires in that you’re blending your personal and professional life. It can be great, but it also has the potential to get awkward, or at worse, disastrous.

Before making a final hiring decision on friends or family, ask yourself these questions to make sure that the fit is good for all parties and that both your personal and project relationship stays healthy.

1. How strong is your relationship?

Before hiring a family member, take a step back to gauge how strong your relationship is with this person.

If you come from a family of frequent fighting or nit-picking, you’d be foolish to think that it will stop just because you’re working together.

On the flip side, good chemistry can lead to a good collaborative project outcome. If your personal relationship is stellar and you communicate well, chances are, your project may benefit.

Also remember: Emotion is always involved in home projects.

You can’t get around this one despite how hard you try. This is a big investment and a big project. You’re going to be emotional about it.

Can your relationship handle negativity or hurdles?

Think about it: How is your cousin going to feel when you, as the client, is upset after having a serious talk about some slip-up, failure, or adjustment that needs to be made? There’s a good chance they are going to take it personally because you have a personal relationship, which isn’t healthy for your relationship or the project unless both of you can separate the emotions from the personal relationship. Do you both have thick skin? Can you both keep things professional and not take things personally?

2. How are your boundaries?

Everyone needs boundaries between work and personal life, but the importance of having boundaries is magnified when you hire a family member or friend.

Keep personal life separate from your project as much as possible. You don’t necessarily want a friend to spend all of their leisure time with you talking only about your project, do you? Conversely, you don’t want constant personal distractions when meeting about your project. You want to stay focused on the project.

Also remember that if you hire family members or friends, they will be insiders.

When you hire your friend, they will learn more intimate details about you, maybe more than you’re comfortable sharing with most friends. You may have to share with them financial information or relational information about how you and your spouse are doing right now. Is that OK with you?

Or imagine this: You’ve hired your brother-in-law to help with your project. It’s Friday night and you’re headed to a family event where said brother-in-law will be in attendance, along with other family members. You arrive and within an hour you realize that the entire family knows more about your project than you could’ve imagined and it’s not all good stuff, its also the problems you’ve had with a subcontractor, the failed inspection, and the banker who hasn’t released the 3rd disbursement check yet and you’re short on cash.

Do you know why this happened? Because your family is fascinated with what’s going on with your project, which you rarely talk about other than from a 30,000-foot viewpoint, and now they have the access to all the juicy details.

3. What is the worst-case scenario?

If you’re planning on using a friend or a family member to help you build or renovate your project, picture the worst-case scenario. If things went south, what would that look like and what would you need to do in order to protect yourself from the fallout? And what can you do now to mitigate the risk?

When we work with friends or family members we often treat the situation more casually than we would if we were actually hiring someone formally. That may mean that you don’t have legit contracts, get proper quotes, or go through the same channels or process that you would with other professionals.

And when there’s so much at stake, it’s not just the fact that it’s your home, the amount of money that you might be spending on it, or that you’re borrowing that money to do this project. There are also personal relationships at stake.

You may think that you’ve known these people for ages and that it’s not going to happen to you or it’s not going to be you that it happens to, but you don’t know that for sure.

Make sure that you understand what can go wrong.

It doesn’t mean that it will … but if you actually think about what can go wrong, then you can at least have an honest conversation about it. You can protect yourself financially, legally, and build in buffers to your process and project overall.

Then the best-case scenario is that it can all be perfectly fine and that you do come out of your project with it costing less money or being faster or more flexible.

But the worst-case scenario is so far at the other end of the spectrum. Family or friends could walk off the project leaving you with a half-finished house or half-finished drawings and nothing can be done about it but eat the cost and spend extra time and money to complete it. It can be a hairy situation.

Top tips for using friends or family on your home project

If you’re going to use friends, family members or friends of friends, as your designer, builder or tradespeople, then do it by the books. There are many occasions when using your personal connections prove beneficial to your project. By all means, use your connections for the betterment of your project, but just make sure you’re doing it in the right way. Here are some tips:

• Create a professional working relationship.
• Use a real contract.
• Follow the same protocol as you would with another professional.
• Set boundaries and expectations (and discuss them with said family member or friend).
• Picture the worst-case scenario and put plans in place to mitigate the risk of it happening.

Do these things and you can be confident that you’re setting yourself up for success in hiring friends and family. And if things do go wrong, that you’re prepared.