17/2025: Trust, not just contracts.

Image © Jose 2025

The inside of the house is progressing, heading towards the last stretch. Still a lot of detailing to do, and the first floor still has a major job coming up sometime in the future (the front door and windows), but the second floor looks pretty complete. We are almost there, but we are not there yet, yet we are moving this weekend. Then starts the phase of settling in and the 16 projects we have lined up to do in the next 12 to 24 months, many of them with my name on them.

A funny thing is that the house outside looks exactly the same. We didn’t do anything to it, while the inside has had some major improvements. We invited a couple of friends to come visit and they were impacted by the difference between outside and inside. I sort of like it, the surprise of it, the rough skin of the outside versus the newly painted inside. We will deal with the outside sometime in the future.

This week was all about a major decision: what to do with the floor of the living room, which the previous owner left as unfinished cement. That kind of cement that is not leveled, hard to clean, bare to the bones. It’s a generous area and, just like with the ceiling, there were plenty who wanted us to tile the entire area, or apply wood flooring which would have to be engineered wood because of the cement below.

I like the texture and the tone of the cold cement, but I know it can get cold, and I don’t like the shiny look that so many shop floors and warehouses have. The right thing to do is to install radiant heating (there is some baseboard and recessed water heating right now) and finish the cement in some sort of satin/matte look, with large tile markings to avoid the airport feeling of an endless floor.

But this idea is expensive, and the alternatives are also expensive, and we have blown through our budget, and some. So, we thought about leaving it as is. But the reality is that this would always be a temporary solution. That floor is hard to live with. My feeling is every day we’d feel the burden of our choice, every day we’d ask ourselves if this was the right thing.

And then the contractor did something very smart. He understood the obstacle and approached my wife saying he thought the radiant heat + cement solution was the right one, that we would regret not doing it now, and he offered to pay for it until we can pay him back. He said he plans to be around to do some of those 16 projects I mentioned above. He knows we are good for it. My take is he knows how much he has made in this job, he knows about all the other upcoming jobs, so he stepped in as a financing partner, with no interest, or at least no visible one.

I know we will pay for this job, perhaps more than we would pay if we did it directly, but we have been paying for his services all along. Why not add some for his financing services? We hesitated, but we might say yes. I can’t stop thinking about how smart this man is, how he identified the bottleneck in the decision-making, and how he stepped up, hedging his risks, investing in his customer.

When I first started working on royalty-based projects in design, I learned a tough lesson: you can’t rely only on contracts, you need trust built through real collaboration first. Early contracts were full of best intentions, but when the relationship strained, no paper could really fix it. That’s why I made it a personal rule: I would only engage in royalty projects after we had already done a traditional project together. Delivery first, trust earned second, and then – and only then – more complex engagements.

That’s what makes this offer from our contractor different. He’s not just financing a floor; he’s betting on a relationship. He’s betting on the work we’ve done together, on what he’s seen of our integrity, and on the mutual benefit of building something longer term.

In design, as in renovation, execution speaks louder than promises. Trust isn’t given. It’s built.
Project by project. Decision by decision. Floor by floor.