Guides · Contractors 2026-04-11 · 6 min

How to tell your contractor what's wrong

A contractor brief is a document, not a phone call. Writing it properly changes what the contractor arrives expecting, what they can legitimately bill for, and who is responsible when the first fix doesn't hold.

By Sander Moorees, property maintenance expert
with Karolina Sarna

A proper contractor brief is a document, not a phone call, and it contains five things: what you observe (the symptom, described factually), where exactly (floor, room, wall, specific area), component details (brand, model, year of installation, any error codes), the mandate amount (the budget ceiling the contractor works within), and your contact for access. Send it by email, not by phone, because email creates a written record of what was agreed before work began, and every later disagreement about scope, price, warranty, or timeline refers back to something both parties can read. Template at the bottom of this page.

The brief is a document, not a conversation

The reverse, the version most homeowners default to, is the phone call. They describe a broken thing to a contractor over the phone, in whatever sentences come out during a stressed call on the kitchen floor next to the puddle. The contractor listens, asks a few questions, gives a loose impression of what the repair will involve, and shows up at an agreed time. Nothing is written down, which means nothing is verifiable later, which means every disagreement about scope, price, warranty, or timeline is an argument between two memories of a phone call. The homeowner’s memory is the memory of someone under stress. The contractor’s memory is the memory of someone who does five of these calls a day. It is not a fair fight, and it is not the fight the homeowner should be having in the first place.

The fix is to stop briefing contractors by phone and start briefing them in writing, always, even for work you intend to follow up by phone later. Email is fine. A proper contact form is better. Anything that produces a written record of what was communicated before the work began is enough. The brief becomes a document, the document becomes part of the quote, the quote becomes part of the contract, and every later conversation refers back to something both parties can read.

What the brief needs to contain

A brief that helps a contractor quote accurately and arrive prepared contains five things. Each of them matters in a specific way, and each of them is something the homeowner is capable of providing without any technical expertise.

What you observe. The symptom, in plain language. Water dripping from the ceiling. A new grinding noise from the boiler. A window that no longer closes flush. Condensation between the panes of a double-glazed unit. Describe the symptom, not your theory about what’s causing it, and describe it with enough detail that someone who isn’t in the room can picture it: when it started, whether it’s constant or intermittent, whether anything you’ve tried has changed the symptom at all.

Where exactly. Contractors cannot diagnose “the kitchen.” They need to know the kitchen, which wall, how high, how far from the nearest fixture. “Ground-floor bedroom, north wall, approximately forty centimetres below the ceiling, in the corner closest to the window” is a usable location. “The bedroom” is not. The more specific the location, the shorter the site visit and the more accurate the initial assessment.

Component details. If there is equipment involved (a boiler, a heat pump, a window unit, an appliance), include the brand, the model, the approximate year of installation, and any error codes displayed. Most manufacturers encode the year of manufacture in the serial number, which you can usually decode in under a minute with a search for “serial number decoder” plus the brand. For error codes, a quick search for the code plus the brand name usually points to a likely cause. This does not make you a technical expert, but it gives you a specific check to ask the contractor about. “E132 usually indicates a control board fault; was that confirmed?” is harder to dismiss than “did you look at everything?” Age matters because a fifteen-year-old component with a problem is a different diagnostic situation from a three-year-old component with the same problem, and the repair-or-replace conversation that follows will hinge on it.

Your mandate. This is the budget ceiling, and it goes in the brief rather than waiting for the phone call after the site visit. The clause is simple: “You are authorised up to EUR ___ to complete this repair. If you expect the cost to exceed that amount, stop and provide a written cost indication and timeframe before proceeding.” Putting the mandate in the original brief means the contractor decides whether to accept the job knowing the budget, instead of discovering it only once they’re standing in your kitchen with their tools out.

Contact for access. Who the contractor should call, when the property is accessible, and any access restrictions: a gate code, a dog, a neighbour who holds the spare key. This is trivial to include and saves the contractor from the thing they hate most, which is turning up and finding no one home.

What to leave out of the brief

Your diagnosis is the first thing to leave out. “I think it’s the boiler pump” is noise unless you’re a heating engineer, and even then it belongs in a different conversation. Your theory about the cause changes the contractor’s diagnostic approach without giving them any reason to trust the theory, and if the theory turns out to be wrong, the homeowner is now arguing about a diagnosis they were never qualified to make.

Your preferred solution is the second thing to leave out. “Just replace the whole thing” surrenders the repair-or-replace decision to the contractor’s commercial incentive, which is usually to do the bigger job. A brief that asks the contractor to assess and recommend preserves the option of the cheaper, smaller intervention.

False urgency is the third thing to leave out. “This has to be done today” is a phrase that converts standard work into premium-rate work, and it should only be used when the defect crosses the threshold for action, which is the question the 4P rule exists to answer. If the defect doesn’t endanger people, pets and environment, production, or possessions, then urgency is a preference, not a necessity, and communicating it as urgency means paying for it as urgency.

The template

The entire brief fits in a single email. Subject line, five short sections, done.

Subject: Repair request, [component] at [address]

[Description of what you observe. When it started. How it behaves.]

Location: [floor, room, wall, specific area]

Component: [type, brand, model, year of installation, error codes if applicable]

You are authorised up to EUR [amount] to complete this repair. If you expect the cost to exceed this amount, please stop and provide a written cost indication and timeframe before proceeding.

Contact for access: [name, phone, availability]

Photos attached.

This does three things at once. It gives the contractor what they need to assess the job accurately. It sets a financial boundary before any conversation about price. And it leaves the diagnostic responsibility where it belongs, which is with the person being paid for the expertise.

Glossary terms used in this guide

Why this shifts the dynamic

Consider what a proper brief prevents. When a contractor arrives cold, the first thirty minutes on site are an assessment you are paying for. At typical European plumber rates, that is around EUR 30 of billable time before any repair work begins. Five such calls in a year is between EUR 150 and EUR 300 of assessment time a five-minute email would have prevented. The information you provide in the brief is the information the contractor no longer has to discover. Every element of the template (the symptom, the location, the error code, the equipment age) shifts billable minutes from diagnostic-on-your-clock to solution-on-your-clock, which is a meaningful difference over a year of typical defects.

A contractor who receives a proper brief reads it and recognises the homeowner as a serious client. A contractor who receives “my kitchen tap is leaking, can you come tomorrow” reads it and recognises the homeowner as every other call they take. These are not equal clients, and they do not get the same level of work, the same attention to scope, or the same care with the quote. A brief that looks professional is treated professionally. A brief that looks amateur gets the treatment the contractor would give anyone walking in off the street, which is not the treatment you want.

The brief is also what the insurance company will ask for if a dispute arises later, and what a small claims process will want to see if an invoice doesn’t match the agreed scope. Everything written down in advance is worth more than everything said afterwards, and the brief is the first piece of writing in what may become a long record. Starting well is not optional; it’s the cheapest way to make every later step easier.

Worked example: Karoliina in Tampere

Karoliina has a slow drain in the bathroom sink. Her instinct is to call a plumber and explain on the phone. Instead she writes a brief.

Subject: Bathroom basin slow drain, mandate EUR 380 attached

Symptom: water draining from the bathroom basin at perhaps a quarter the normal rate. Started two weeks ago, gradually worsening. No standing water in the wall pipe; the issue is downstream of the trap.

Location: ground floor, bathroom adjacent to the kitchen.

Component: Geberit basin trap, installed 2014 with the bathroom renovation.

Mandate: you are authorised up to EUR 380 to diagnose and resolve. If you expect the cost to exceed that amount, please stop and provide a written cost indication before proceeding.

Access: I am home Wednesday after 13:00 or any time on Friday.

Total time to write: about six minutes. The plumber arrives prepared, brings the right replacement trap and a drain auger, runs through the work in 90 minutes, invoices EUR 285. Without the brief, the same call would have produced a 30-minute on-site assessment (EUR 35 of billable time alone), a higher-quoted figure produced under information asymmetry, and no written record of what was agreed. The brief is the cheapest document the homeowner ever writes.