How to Choose an Electrician for a Remodel, in 5 Written Lines
Read the line in each proposal that covers the kitchen. One of them gives you a sentence about kitchen wiring. The other gives you counts of circuits and devices, listed against the room they sit in.
Both proposals cover the same rooms. Only one describes work anyone can check later, because only one of them counted anything. On a remodel, that difference stops being academic, since everything that gets buried behind drywall stays buried until somebody opens the wall again.
Two electricians can sound equally competent standing in your kitchen. The one worth hiring has written down enough for you to walk the finished rooms and count what was promised, and the reading that finds this out happens before anyone signs.
The Same Rooms Written Up Two Different Ways
Two descriptions of the same job can differ in what they leave unsaid. One electrician writes rewire kitchen and dining room, install new fixtures. Another writes out the circuits that will land in your panel and then the devices each circuit feeds, in the order the current reaches them. Both have covered the kitchen. Only the second has said what covering the kitchen means, and the first will mean whatever it turns out to mean once the walls are open and somebody has to settle it on the spot.
On a repair call, the fault draws the boundary of the job before anyone writes anything down. Nothing draws it on a remodel, because your finished rooms do not exist yet and nobody can point at them. The electrician is being asked to build something that lives entirely in sentences until the day it lives in your wall, and those sentences have to hold up while framing, insulation, and finish work move through the same rooms on a schedule somebody else set.
Circuits and Devices Are the Unit of Measurement
A room is a place. A circuit is a run of conductors from one breaker to everything on it, and a device is a box screwed to a stud. Both of those carry a number.
The distinction does real work. A circuit is a run back to the panel and a breaker in a space that has to exist before anything lands on it, so every circuit named in your proposal is a claim about the panel as well as about the room. A device is smaller, and there are more of them, and the count of devices fills the days between rough-in and trim.
Ask what that looks like on paper and the answer is unglamorous. A room-level entry says kitchen wiring as specified. An itemized entry follows the current: the breaker first, then the run it feeds, then the devices sitting on that run, and it repeats for every circuit in the room. A kitchen entry then names the dedicated run for the dishwasher, then the receptacle that run ends at, and the number of receptacles along each counter is written down rather than assumed. None of it is technical enough to need an electrician to read it back to you. You can stand in your finished kitchen a month later, count the receptacles along the counter, and hold that number against the page; either it matches, or it does not. A room-level entry gives you nothing to hold it against, because it never committed to a number.
An electrician who works this way already has the counts, because working them out is how the job was sized in the first place. One who will not put them in writing has not made the count yet, and a count that does not exist before demolition gets made after it, by whoever is standing in your room at the time.
The Panel Line, Written as Work or as a Condition
Every remodel adds something to the panel, even when nothing about the service changes. New circuits need space, and a panel can run out of space even when it still has capacity. So a proposal carries a panel line whether or not anyone drew attention to it, and the wording of that line separates two otherwise similar documents. One says a subpanel will be installed and fed from the main. The other says panel upgrade if required. The second is not a scope. It is a condition attached to a scope, and the party who gets to say whether the condition has been met is the party who wrote the sentence.
The wording matters more here than on a service call, because panel work has to happen while the walls your new circuits pass through are still open. A subpanel and a service change are different jobs with different lead times and different people on your site, and a proposal naming neither has left an open question sitting where a commitment should be. The arithmetic behind the answer belongs to the electrician, who adds your existing load against what the remodel will add. What belongs to you is the sentence saying which of the two jobs that arithmetic produced.
Fixture and Device Choices Carry a Date
Someone has to buy the fixtures and devices, and a proposal is where that gets said. When it does not get said, your electrician arrives to hang something nobody ordered, or arrives with a box that will not fit an opening framed for a different one.
The reason it turns into a date rather than a preference is physical. A pendant needs its outlet in a spot chosen by where the island lands, and a heavy fixture needs blocking between the joists put in while the ceiling is open. Both are commitments about a product nobody has bought yet, made by people who will not see it for months.
So the useful entry is a deadline: the day by which your selections have to be in the electrician's hands, and what happens to the sequence if they are not. A date sitting in the document is one both parties agreed to. A date living in somebody's head moves.
Exclusions Carry the Same Weight as the Scope
They read like fine print, and they are the only place a proposal says what it will not do. The circuits that stay inside the wall belong in that list too. The rooms being opened get new work, and the existing runs feeding the rest of your house pass through the same framing untouched, which means a proposal silent about them has not promised to leave them alone and has not promised to touch them either.
Read the exclusions against the scope, entry by entry, and the pairs that fail to line up are the questions worth asking. If a room appears in the scope and its existing devices appear nowhere, ask whether those are being replaced or reused. If low-voltage cabling appears in neither list, ask who is running it, because cable that belongs to nobody only becomes visible after your walls close and the furniture is back in the room. An empty exclusion list is a list of questions nobody has asked yet.
The Line That Says Who Closes the Wall
Nine line items in one proposal and three in the other can cover the same rooms, and only the nine can be held against a finished wall. The last entry on that list is the one that starts an argument nobody planned for, and it surfaces once the wiring is done: after an electrician cuts into your wall to pull a circuit through it, somebody has to close that opening, and then somebody has to patch and paint it.
An electrician's trade stops at the box and the conductor. Closing an opening is drywall work and matching the finish around it is painting work, and a proposal either names who does each or leaves the wall open in a sentence while your house has it closed. Ask for that line before anyone opens anything, because once the wall is closed the question has an honest answer on both sides and nothing written behind either.
Frequently Asked Questions
It should say which circuits stay live and where you can plug things in while the rooms are torn up. Over the course of weeks of work, your refrigerator, your internet equipment, and your on-site tools all need somewhere to land, and the circuits feeding them may be the ones being replaced. Ask for that sentence in writing, because the alternative is an extension cord running through a doorway for a month.
The proposal names it. Someone who took the cover off can tell you the make, how many spaces are open, and whether the breakers you already have are still made for it. A proposal describing your panel only as an existing panel was written from your driveway, and every number in it that depends on your panel is a guess. Ask that question before you compare anything else.
The household does, at a walk before the wiring goes in. An electrician marks proposed device locations on the studs, and someone walks it, moving a switch off the hinge side of a door or shifting a receptacle out from behind where a dresser will sit. Once the boxes are nailed and the drywall is on, moving one becomes a repair, so those marks are the last easy chance you get.
Separately, and for a reason worth knowing. Two electricians walking your house together converge, because the second one hears the first one's assumptions and builds against them. What makes two proposals useful to you is that two people each had to work out what your job was, and once they have heard each other, you are reading one opinion twice. Send them the same rooms and the same drawings if you have any.
Anything fed from your panel. If the remodel adds or moves circuits, breakers get added, moved or relabelled, and the directory on your panel door stops matching the house unless somebody rewrites it. Ask for the directory to be redone at the end of the work and for the old one to stay taped inside the door until the new one has been checked against the breakers you have.
It can, and the test both sides can actually apply is whether the condition was discoverable. Old wiring inside a wall nobody could open before demolition is a genuine change. A scope described too loosely produces the same conversation with nothing behind it. Only the electrician who wrote the scope was in a position to look, so ask each, before you sign, what they could not see in your house and what they would do about it.
Get the electrical scope for your remodel written room by room — before the drywall crew is scheduled, since the drywall date moves with the wiring and everything after it moves too. Zimmerman Electric Company serves Redondo Beach, Torrance, and Manhattan Beach. Call (310) 378-1323.