Home repair packages

Home repair packages exist because almost nobody has one broken thing. They have eleven, written on a list on the refrigerator since April. Booking those one at a time means eleven phone calls, eleven trip charges and a spring. Wright’s Repairs groups the jobs that go together into a single visit with a single written price, and most of them finish in a day.

Why bundling small jobs is worth doing

A service call has a fixed cost before anyone picks up a tool. Somebody drives to your house, parks, carries in a ladder and a toolbag, and figures out what they are looking at. That overhead is the same whether the work takes twenty minutes or six hours. Spread across nine jobs instead of one, it stops being the largest line on your invoice.

One visit instead of four

There is a second cost that never shows up on an invoice, which is your morning. Four separate visits means four windows you stayed home for. Packages collapse that into one, and the crew arrives knowing the full list rather than discovering it on your kitchen counter.

One written price before anyone starts

Every package is quoted in writing from photos and a description before a truck leaves Platt Road. If something on site turns out to be different from what the photo showed, you hear it that morning and decide, rather than reading it in a change order afterward. The reasoning is the same one we apply on a kitchen remodel, and it is described on the page about how we work.

For a house you just bought

The first eight weeks in a house generate more small work than any other period of ownership. The new homeowner package is the sweep: locks rekeyed, batteries and detectors replaced, shelving hung, the four things the previous owner clearly meant to get to. It gets the house to a baseline before you start living around its faults.

Where an inspection report is driving the list, inspection repairs works straight off the document. Handrails, ground fault outlets, a missing downspout extension and a dozen other items that inspectors flag in nearly every Southeast Michigan house. We price line by line so you can see what each finding costs to close.

Families with small children usually add two more at the same time. Nursery and childproofing covers gates, latches and anchoring anything that can tip, fastened into framing rather than stuck to paint. Working from home adds a third, and a home office setup handles the desk, the shelving, the cable management and the lighting in one pass.

For a house you are about to sell

Buyers price the visible defects at several times what they cost to fix. A cracked pane, a dead outlet and a loose railing read as deferred maintenance across the whole house, and that discount is applied to the offer. Pre listing repairs close that list before photos are taken, on the schedule your agent needs.

Landlords run the same play between tenants, and rental turnover repairs is built for the narrow gap when a unit is empty. Patch, paint, replace what is broken, verify the safety items, hand back the keys. We work to your turn date rather than our queue, and we will say plainly if the date is not achievable.

The items that show up on nearly every report in this area:

• Ground fault protection missing in kitchens, baths, garages and outdoors
• Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms past their date or removed entirely
• A handrail that is loose, too short, or not there at all
• Downspouts discharging at the foundation rather than away from it
• Windows with a failed seal, a cracked pane or no working latch

For staying in the house you already have

This is the fastest growing part of our small job work, and it is almost always a family making a house work for a parent. Aging in place modifications is the whole house version: lighting, thresholds, reach, handrails and the two or three rooms that actually get used. Most of it is unglamorous and most of it matters more than the expensive items people buy first.

Bathrooms carry the most risk, so they get their own scope. Bathroom safety for seniors covers grab bars anchored into blocking, a seat, a handheld and a surface that is not slick when wet. Where the room itself has to change rather than gain fittings, an accessible bathroom upgrade reworks the layout, and the full design and build version lives under accessibility modifications.

Veterans have a separate route, since some modification work is covered by grant programs with their own documentation requirements. Veteran home modification is scoped and written up so it can be submitted rather than reworked afterward.

When there is a date on the calendar

Some of this work arrives with a deadline attached and no flexibility in it. Hospital discharge home prep is the clearest case. Somebody is coming home Thursday and the house is not ready: a bedroom needs to move downstairs, a threshold needs a ramp, the bathroom needs bars and light. Tell us the discharge date on the first call, because it changes how we schedule and what we can promise.

The lighter version of the same idea is hosting. A guest ready package handles the spare room, the guest bath and the twelve small annoyances you stop noticing until other people are in the house. It books solid in the two weeks before Thanksgiving, so the useful time to ask is October.

Packages that follow the Michigan seasons

Fall winterization is the one with the clearest payback. Hoses off and spigots drained, gutters cleared, the sump discharge checked, exterior penetrations sealed. Almost every expensive spring call we take traces to something on that list that nobody did in October. Draft sealing and weatherization is the comfort half of it, and it shows up on a heating bill rather than a repair invoice.

The spring opening package is the reverse pass: reconnect what was shut down, look at what the freeze moved, and catch the damage while it is still small. An annual home check visit puts both on a schedule so the list gets made by somebody who knows what to look for.

Two more are risk work rather than comfort work. A fire and carbon monoxide safety sweep replaces every alarm on date, puts them where code wants them and clears the dryer duct. Water damage prevention is the same idea for the failure that actually costs the most: supply lines, shutoffs, drainage and the corner of the basement that has been slightly damp for two years.

For a house nobody is living in

An empty house fails quietly. A supply line lets go in February and runs for six weeks. Snowbird home watch puts somebody physically inside on a schedule, checking the things that matter and sending photographs, which is the only version of this that catches a problem while it is still cheap.

Technology helps but does not replace the walk through. A smart home starter sets up leak sensors, a thermostat you can see from Florida and cameras at the doors, all on one system rather than five apps. Sensors tell you something is wrong. They do not turn off the water.

What a package will not cover

A package is a bundle of small jobs, not a discount on a remodel. When a list turns out to contain a gut bathroom or a wall that needs to come out, we stop and rescope it as a project on the design and build side. That is a better answer than quietly running a remodel through a service visit and charging you for both.

There is also work Wright’s does not take at all, on any package, and we publish the list rather than discovering it on your driveway. Read the work we do not take before you build your list. A referral over the phone costs you nothing; a visit that ends in one costs you a morning.

What turns up that nobody put on the list

Small jobs uncover things. Pulling a vanity finds a subfloor that has been wet for years. Opening a wall for a grab bar finds no blocking and wiring that has no business being there. We tell you on the spot, with a price for dealing with it and a price for closing it back up, and you choose. Neither of those is a change order you find out about later.

When water has already done damage, the repair grows past the package and becomes its own scope. Water damage restoration covers the cut out, the dry down and the rebuild, documented with photographs while the wall is still open so your insurer sees what the crew saw.

The other common surprise is volume. A turnover or an estate clearing generates more material than a truck bed, and junk removal gets added so the crew is not working around piles. Wall damage found behind furniture usually goes onto the same visit as drywall patch repair.

Where a package hands off to a real project

Some lists are a remodel wearing a repair costume. A kitchen where the cabinets are failing and the layout does not work is not a fixture swap, and pretending otherwise wastes your money twice. That work moves to the kitchen side of the company, with drawings, selections and a real schedule.

The same line runs through the rest of the house. A bathroom that needs its layout changed belongs under bathroom renovation, and a lower level that is being finished rather than patched belongs under basement finishing. Both are design and build projects with a different process and a different timeline.

What makes a package cheaper, in rough order of effect:

• Sending the whole list at once, including the parts that feel too trivial
• Flexibility on the date, so the visit groups with nearby work
• Decisions made before the day rather than in your hallway
• Clear access to the work, which mostly means moving furniture yourself
• Photographs with the first message, which cut a site visit out entirely

How a package visit actually runs

Send the list and photographs of anything you can reach. Rough is fine. We come back with a written scope and a flat price, with anything uncertain called out as uncertain rather than buried in a contingency. On the day, one crew works the list top to bottom and you get told what was found, including anything we did not touch that you should know about.

Most package work draws on several trades at once, which is why it groups so well. A single visit might pull from minor plumbing repair, light fixture installation, trim and finish carpentry and door repair without anyone rebooking. The seasonal ones lean on exterior repair instead.

Where we work across Southeast Michigan

Crews cover Washtenaw, Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Livingston and Monroe counties from a yard in Ypsilanti. Which package sells where is oddly predictable. Aging in place work concentrates in the established neighborhoods of Ann Arbor and Dearborn, where people have been in the same house for thirty years and intend to stay.

New homeowner and inspection work runs heaviest in Canton, Westland and Ypsilanti, where the housing turns over faster. Turnover and rental work follows the student calendar in and around Washtenaw County, which means August is a different month for us than it is for anyone else.

Scheduling is geographic. A four hour package books faster when it sits next to other work headed the same direction, so telling us your flexibility is worth real money on a small job. If a date is fixed, say so and we will work to it or tell you we cannot.

Housing age changes the contents of the same package from town to town. A winterization visit on a prewar house near downtown Ypsilanti is mostly about air sealing an uninsulated rim joist and dealing with storm windows. The same package on a subdivision house in Novi is mostly spigots, gutters and the sump discharge, because the envelope is already tight.

Second homes and seasonal properties cluster to the north and west, out toward Howell and the lakes beyond it. Those are the addresses where the watch and winterization packages earn their keep, because nobody is standing in the house to notice that the heat quit on a Tuesday.

Pick the package that fits your list

If none of these quite matches what is on your refrigerator, send the list anyway. Packages are a starting shape rather than a menu, and the useful version is the one built around the eleven things actually wrong with your house. We will tell you which items belong together, which can wait and which are not ours to do.

One thing worth saying plainly about timing. Every package on this page that touches the outside of the house gets harder, slower or impossible once the ground freezes, and that happens here sometime in November. Anything indoors runs all winter without penalty. If your list mixes the two, the outdoor half sets the deadline and the indoor half can wait until January without costing you anything.

Want to see the larger work behind the same crews first? View our Portfolio. Ready to get the list priced? Contact us now for a free quote.