Handyman or General Contractor? Who to Call for What

Two homeowners called us the same week. The first had a list — a sticky door, a hole in the drywall where a knob went through, two dead ceiling fans, a running toilet, and trim coming off the wall. She'd been calling specialists one at a time for two months and had gotten through three of them.

The second hired a guy off a marketplace app to "open up" the wall between his kitchen and living room. It was load-bearing. Now there's a sag in the ceiling, no permit, no engineer's letter, and no insurance.

Both called the wrong kind of person. Here's how to get it right the first time.

The handyman lane

A handyman handles work that's small, defined, mostly cosmetic or single-trade, doesn't touch structure, and doesn't need a permit. The defining quality: one skilled person with a van full of tools can knock it out, often in a single visit.

• Drywall patches, texture matching, touch-up paint.
• Doors that stick or won't latch; cabinet doors and drawers hanging crooked.
• Trim, baseboard, casing, crown, and caulking.
• Fixture swaps in the same location — faucet, toilet, light, ceiling fan, garbage disposal.
• Mounting: TVs, shelving, mirrors, curtain rods, grab bars, storage racks.
• Weatherstripping, door sweeps, thresholds.
• Gutter cleaning, small exterior repairs, siding touch-ups.
• Punch lists — the twenty small things you stopped seeing two years ago.

The value here is throughput. One person, one trip charge, one afternoon, whole list done.

The general contractor lane

A general contractor runs multi-trade projects with a schedule and dependencies — jobs where a plumber, an electrician, a framer, a tile setter, and a painter all have to show up in the right order, and getting that order wrong costs you a week.

• Kitchen and bathroom remodels.
• Additions, bonus rooms, finished basements.
• Anything that moves or removes a wall.
• Decks, porches, pergolas, and outdoor structures.
• Any project requiring a permit and inspections.
• Anything that changes the structure or footprint of the house.

And here's the actual, unglamorous value of a GC, which nobody explains: we own the sequence, the inspections, the subs, and the responsibility.

On a bathroom, rough plumbing gets inspected before the walls close. Walls close before tile goes up. Tile gets set before the vanity goes in. If the tile setter shows up Tuesday and the rough plumbing didn't pass, somebody has to make phone calls, re-sequence three crews, and eat the schedule hit. If you're your own GC, that somebody is you — from your desk at work, while a tile setter stands in your driveway with a truck full of thinset. If you hired a general contractor, that's our problem, not yours. That's what you're buying. Not just labor. Ownership of the mess.

The two expensive ways people get this wrong

Calling five specialists for a ten-item punch list

The most common and most wasteful. A plumber for the toilet, an electrician for the fans, a painter for the drywall patch, a carpenter for the trim, a garage door company for the sticky door. That's five phone calls, five trip charges, five scheduling windows, five days you have to be home, and five minimum-charge invoices — for a list one handyman finishes before lunch. Specialists are the right call for specialist problems. A punch list is not a specialist problem.

Hiring a handyman for a job that needed a GC

This direction is worse. Somebody agrees to do work that needed a permit, a licensed sub, and an inspection — and does it anyway, off the books, for less. The work happens outside the system. Nobody inspected it, there's no permit on record, and quite possibly no insurance.

So when it fails — and structural and water failures do fail, just not immediately — you own all of it. The repair. The disclosure when you sell. The conversation with your insurer. The savings were real, and they were also the smallest number in the entire story.

The jobs in the middle, and how to call it

Plenty of work sits on the line. Recessed lighting in one room. A vanity four inches wider than the old one. A bar sink where there's no plumbing. Not remodels — but not fixture swaps either. Run it through this. Any single "yes" puts you in general contractor territory:

1. 1Does it touch water, gas, structure, or the electrical panel? New plumbing runs, gas lines, load paths, new circuits. Yes means GC, with a licensed sub.
2. 2Does it require a permit or an inspection? If you don't know, call the building department with jurisdiction over your address and ask.
3. 3Does it need more than one trade, in sequence? If the electrician has to finish before the drywall can start, somebody has to run that.
4. 4Is anything being moved rather than replaced? Moving a sink, a wall, a window, or an outlet is a different job than swapping one.
5. 5Would a mistake here be hidden behind a finished surface? Waterproofing, framing, wiring in a wall. If yes, you want it permitted and inspected.

All no? It's handyman work. Hand somebody the whole list and get your Saturday back.

Why one call is the whole point

Wright Way Services runs both lanes. We'll knock out a punch list of small repairs, and we'll run a full remodel with permits, subs, inspections, and a schedule. That's a practical advantage for you: it means you don't have to make the call in this article correctly. You describe the problem, we send the right person.

It also means the small job doesn't get orphaned. When a handyman visit in Senoia turns up a soft subfloor under the toilet, we don't shrug and leave. We already have the crew who fixes that.

One number, either way

Don't spend a week working out who to call. Call (770) 301-4638, tell us what's going on, and we'll tell you honestly which lane it's in — including the times the answer is "that's a two-hour handyman visit, don't let anybody sell you a remodel." We answer around the clock, all over Newnan and Coweta County.