The frame is the one part of your house you can't swap out later. Cabinets can be replaced and flooring can be redone, but if the walls aren't straight and the structure isn't right, every trade that follows inherits the problem — and eventually, so do you. We spend most of our year framing large commercial and multi-family buildings, but we frame custom homes too, and the things that make a framing sub good on a four-story apartment building are exactly what a homeowner should be checking for. Here's the checklist we'd use if we were hiring a framer for our own house.
Verify the boring stuff first
Before you ever talk price, ask for proof of general liability insurance and workers' compensation coverage — and ask for the certificates to be sent directly from the contractor's insurance agent, not handed over as a photocopy. Ask how they're licensed for residential work in your state, and whether they'd be contracting with you directly or working as a sub under your general contractor, because the rules differ. A legitimate outfit answers all of this in one email. A contractor who gets cagey about insurance is telling you how the rest of the job will go.
Ask who is actually framing your house
There's a real difference between a contractor with an in-house crew on payroll and one who rounds up whoever's available the week your lumber lands. Ask how long the crew has worked together, who will run your job day to day, and whether that person will actually be on site. A crew that has framed fifty buildings together moves differently than five strangers — faster, safer, and with far fewer of the small mistakes that add up in a frame.
Go look at a frame, not a photo gallery
Anyone can show you a finished house. Ask to walk a job in progress instead. You don't need to be a framer to read a jobsite: sight down the walls and see if they're straight, look at whether the cuts are tight, notice whether material is staged and organized or buried in the mud, and watch how the crew works. A clean, organized frame is almost always a straight, well-nailed one — the habits travel together.
Get the scope in writing
"Framing" means different things to different contractors, and most disputes start in that gap. Does the price include beams and headers? Stairs? Sheathing and house wrap? Setting windows and exterior doors? Material handling and daily cleanup? Who supplies the lumber, and who eats shortages and returns? Who coordinates with the truss plant? A one-page written scope answers all of it before it becomes an argument. If you want a rough sense of what your project should run before bids come in, our ballpark estimate calculator is a fair starting point.
Insist on a payment schedule that follows the work
A reasonable structure looks like a modest mobilization payment, progress payments tied to visible milestones — first-floor walls up, roof framed — and a final payment after your walkthrough. Be wary of anyone who wants a large share of the money before a wall exists. Framers get paid for framing, and a contractor confident in their work has no problem being paid as it goes up.
Red flags worth walking away from
- A price dramatically below every other bid — that money comes back out of the job somewhere.
- No certificate of insurance, or excuses instead of one.
- Cash only, or most of the money due before work starts.
- "We don't need anything in writing."
- No lumberyard, builder, or past customer who will vouch for them.
What commercial discipline buys you
Our crews have framed more than 1,000 units of multi-family housing, and a custom home gets the same system: engineered plans followed to the letter, walls checked straight and plumb before the next floor goes on, a schedule we commit to and hit, and a deck left clean for the next trade. You can see the full scope of what our framing services include, from foundation sill to roof sheathing.
Building this year or planning for next? Send us your plans for a straight answer and a real number.