DVCRA’s New Home Improvement Committee

Another great initiative from the boys and girls behind the Don Vale Cabbagetown Resident’s Association to help local home owners get great service by referring them to friends that have helped them before.  It’s these kind of initiatives that help us all collectively.  I was providing a similar service to my clients and will be helping them populate some of the blank spots.  Following is the message that was sent to me today.

We are pleased to introduce the DVCRA’s new Home Improvement Committee. We hope you will take a moment to read this email. It addresses: 1) the mandate of this new committee; 2) how to help us compile a list of home improvement service providers in the area who members have had positive experiences with and would recommend; and 3) how to help us fulfill our mandate.

Mandate

The mandate of this new committee is to provide useful information to DVCRA members about improving, restoring and maintaining Cabbagetown homes, including information about local home improvement and home maintenance service providers and architects by:

1. Compiling and maintaining a list of local home improvement and home maintenance service providers and tradespeople who DVCRA members have had positive experiences with and would recommend.
2. Providing links on the DVCRA website to other relevant resources on the web (e.g. the Cabbagetown Preservation Society website at http://www.cabbagetownpa.ca/Pages/03HCD.html and the Canadian Association of Heritage Providers’ website at  http://www.caphc.ca/).
3. Liaising with the City and with the Cabbagetown Preservation Association to ensure that DVCRA members are aware of all heritage conservation issues, tax credits and grant programs relating to home improvement.
4. Hosting informational sessions on topics that are relevant to home improvement issues in Cabbagetown.
5. Making the Committee and its list of recommended service providers known to providers and tradespeople who do work in the area.
6. Providing news to DVCRA members concerning local home improvement projects (e.g. award winning projects and renovations featured in the media).
7. Using the collective voice of DVCRA members in other ways to improve the overall quality and affordability of home improvement and home maintenance services in Cabbagetown.

List of Service Providers

Our first task is to reach out to all DVCRA homeowner members who have had improvement or maintenance work done to their properties (including everything from tuck pointing, roofing and gable repairs to kitchen renovations and tree pruning) over the past three years and have had positive experiences. If this includes you, we would like you to tell us the following:

1. What sort of work did you have done?
2. Who did it?
3. Why would you recommend this person or company – e.g. they stuck to budget, the work was completed on schedule, the quality of the work was high.

From the responses we receive, we will compile a list of recommended home improvement service providers and comments to post on the DVCRA website at www.cabbagetowner.com. This list will become a valuable resource for all Cabbagetown homeowners who are considering doing work on their houses but may not know who to hire. Making this list known will also provide an extra incentive to service providers who do work in the area to do their best work at their best rates – and to do the smaller jobs that are often difficult to find someone to do. This will benefit us all.

If you have had work done to your property in the past three years, please take a moment to respond to this email and to the three questions above. Please also provide any contact information you have for service providers you would recommend. You do not need to include your own address where the work was done, although this would be helpful if the work is visible from the street. It would also be helpful if you would consider making yourself available to answer any questions that other DVCRA members might have about your home improvement experience.

Get Involved!

Whether or not you have had work done or are planning to do work on your home, please let us know if you have ideas to help us fulfill our mandate or if would like to join the committee. You can email us at info@cabbagetowner.com or post a message at http://cabbagetowner.com/contact/. We would love to hear from you!

Thanks very much.

On behalf of the DVCRA Home Improvement Committee

Please make sure you get your votes in…