When Can You Start an Outdoor Home Improvement?

With the winter sludge, salt-stained cars, and icy walkways still lingering, many of your outdoor home improvements must wait to avoid higher labor costs and compromised quality. On the other hand, if you wait till the first day of spring to arrive to start planning your project and contact contractors, you've already missed an opportunity to receive the benefits associated with the first projects of the season. Here's what you need to know to avoid starting a project too earlyýor too late.

When Does the Outdoor Home Improvement Season Begin?
The simple answer is March, but depending on where you live and the specific project you're hoping to complete, the timeline can shift a few weeks or a month or more. And, of course, as the popular saying goes, the beginning and end of March are two different animals. Cold weather can affect both labor and materials, and understanding how each component is affected will help you determine when the actual work can beginý.

You might think that finding a contractor whose employees will work in the cold isn't hard to find, but often it isn't as much about toughness as it is logistics and safety. Any project that requires lifting is problematic when you have to wear an extra couple layers of clothing. According to 2009 National Home Improvement Estimator eBook, the cost of labor will generally increase between 10-15 percent when contractors have to work in temperatures below 40 degrees, and a staggering 30-35 percent when the temperature is below 20 degrees.

While cold temperatures generally labor costs, materials tend to be an all-or-nothing deal. If it's too cold to paint, trying to do so will ruin the paint job, often in dramatic fashion. Instead of a finish that lasts 8 years, the paint might hold up for only 8 months or 8 hours in some cases. Each product is different, and exact specifications frequently change. Older paint formulas, for example, used to require temperatures that would stay above 50 degrees during application and drying periods. Most paint today, however, can be applied in temperatures as low as 35 degrees.

Project-by-Project Analysis
To see which common home improvements truly arrive during the first weeks of spring, ServiceMagic—leading online resource connecting homeowners to home improvement contractors—looked at homeowners' average requests for the winter months Dec.-Feb. and compared them to the number of requests in March.

Average requests per month during 2008
Deck Installation: Dec.-Feb (1,750), March (4,761)
Exterior House Painting: Dec.-Feb. (1,516), March (3,361)
Wood Fence Installation: Dec.-Feb. (2,137), March (5,031)
Asphalt Roofing Installation: Dec.-Feb. (2,556), March (4,841)
Vinyl Siding Installation: Dec.-Feb. (981), March (1,676)
Seamless Gutter Installation: Dec.-Feb. (986), March (1,811)

Early Birds and Cheap Worms
While homeowner demand is a reasonably effective way to gauge when the outdoor home improvement season starts, the homeowners who talk to contractors in February and even back in January have a leg up on their neighbors. Perhaps, some of them were hoping to complete their projects over the winter, but homeowners who were planning ahead are probably already on contractors' work schedules as they spend the last winter month finalizing building plans for when the air warms and the ground thaws.

Here's what Chris Alpers, one of ServiceMagic's preferred painting contractors, said, "The best time to book is in winter. You'll get a better price, and you'll be more efficiently scheduled. In the spring and summer, we might have 5 or 6 projects for one week. Then, I have to pay my guys overtime for the work."

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