By Radu Oprea, Owner, Wolf Spirit Deck · Illinois Contractor License #TGC119852 · Naperville, IL · Last updated: June 2026
I build decks for a living, and I still think hiring a contractor is one of the more stressful things a homeowner does. You’re handing someone a five-figure check and trusting them to bolt something to your house that your kids will run around on. Most people I meet in La Grange have already been burned once, or know a neighbor who was.
So here’s the post I wish more homeowners had read before they called us. These are the questions I’d ask if I were the one hiring, and the answers I’d want to hear. A few of them might cost me a job someday by making buyers smarter. I’m fine with that. You can see how we’d answer them on our La Grange deck builders page, but the point here is to give you a way to judge anyone, us included.
1. Are you registered with the Village of La Grange, and will you pull the permit yourself?
This is the fastest way to separate the real contractors from the guys with a truck and a Facebook page.
La Grange requires every contractor doing work in the village to register with the Community Development Department before a permit gets released. You can read the requirements straight from the source on the Village of La Grange contractor registration page. A builder who works here regularly will already be registered and won’t blink at the question.
The answer that should worry you is some version of “you pull the permit as the homeowner.” Technically you can. But what they’re really doing is moving the liability onto you. If the work fails inspection, it’s your name on the application, not theirs. When a contractor wants to skip the permit entirely to “save you money,” walk away. The fee they’re saving you is small, and the headache when you sell the house and the deck has no permit on record is not.
2. What’s your license number, and can I see your certificate of insurance today?
Anyone can say they’re licensed and insured. The question is whether they’ll prove it on the spot.
A legitimate builder can hand you a license number (ours is TGC119852) and email you a current certificate of insurance the same day, with general liability and workers’ comp both listed. Don’t accept a screenshot from two years ago. Insurance lapses. Ask for a current certificate, and if the number is big, call the agent listed on it and confirm it’s active.
Here’s why this matters more than people think. If an uninsured worker gets hurt on your property, you can end up on the hook. The deck quote that looked $3,000 cheaper stops looking cheap real fast.
3. Who is actually on my property building this, your crew or a sub I’ve never met?
Some companies sell the job in a nice polo shirt and then hand the build to a rotating cast of subcontractors. That’s not automatically bad. Plenty of good builders use trusted subs. What’s bad is not knowing.
Ask flat out: are these your employees, and will the same crew be here start to finish? You want one foreman who owns the project, not a different three guys every morning who each think someone else checked the ledger height. On our jobs I can tell you the name of the lead carpenter on your build. If a company can’t, that tells you how much oversight you’re actually buying.
4. Can you show me a deck you built near here that’s at least three years old?
Anyone can photograph a deck the day it’s finished. Fresh stain and tight boards look great in May. The real test is what that deck looks like after three Chicago winters.
Ask to see an older local project, ideally one you can drive past. Has the framing stayed flat? Are the boards cupping? Did the railing stay tight? We did a five-year inspection of our own builds across the same zip codes and wrote up what we found in our Naperville cedar vs. Trex vs. TimberTech review, partly because I wanted homeowners to see aged work, not just the glamour shots. A builder who’s proud of their three-year-old decks will happily point you to one. A builder who only shows you photos from last week is hiding the part that matters.
5. What’s not in this quote?
This is the question that saves people the most money, and almost nobody asks it.
A low number on a proposal usually means something got left out. Common things that quietly disappear from cheap quotes: tear-out and disposal of the old deck, permit fees, footing depth, surface prep, and the cost of hauling material into a tight backyard. Then they reappear as change orders once your old deck is already in a dumpster and you have no leverage.
When we compared three real quotes on the same backyard, the cheapest bid wasn’t actually cheapest once you added back everything it skipped. I broke that down line by line in this post on why a $19K quote beat a $35K one. Read it before you sign anything. Then make every builder give you an itemized quote so you’re comparing the same scope, not just the same bottom number.
6. How are you handling footings and frost depth for our soil?
This one’s a quiet expertise check. Most homeowners won’t know if the answer is right, but you’ll absolutely hear it if the contractor stumbles.
Around here, deck footings have to extend below the frost line, which runs roughly 42 inches deep in our part of Cook County. Go shallower and the ground heaves every winter, and within a few seasons your deck is pulling away from the house and the doors don’t line up. A builder who knows the local code will talk about footing depth, soil, and frost without you prompting. If you ask how deep the footings go and you get a vague “deep enough,” that’s a problem. The village inspector is going to check it anyway, so you want someone who builds to that standard the first time. The same care shows up in how a builder handles permits and inspections generally, which I walked through in detail in our Naperville deck permit process post.
7. What happens after I pay you and something goes wrong?
Every builder is friendly before the deposit clears. You’re hiring for the version of them that exists eighteen months later when a board warps.
Ask what the warranty covers, get it in writing, and ask the more revealing question: when was the last time you went back to fix something out of warranty, and what did you do? The answer tells you whether they treat a callback as an obligation or an annoyance. A company that plans to be in business in this area for the next decade protects its name in towns like La Grange and Western Springs, because word travels fast between neighbors. A company chasing the next job doesn’t.
A few smaller things worth doing
The seven questions above carry most of the weight, but while you’re at it: read the reviews that are three and four stars, not just the five-star ones, because that’s where you learn how a company handles problems. Pay attention to whether they answer the phone before you’ve paid them, since that’s the friendliest they will ever be. And trust your read of the person standing in your backyard. If they’re cagey about a permit or annoyed by a fair question, that’s the answer.
Hiring a deck builder isn’t really about finding the lowest number. It’s about finding someone who’ll still pick up the phone in two years. Ask these questions, watch how people react to them, and the right choice usually sorts itself out.
If you’re in La Grange and want straight answers to all seven of these, that’s the whole conversation we’d rather have anyway. You can reach us at the number below.
Wolf Spirit Deck Owner & CEO: Radu Oprea Illinois Contractor License #: TGC119852 Naperville Office: 2020 Calamos Ct, Suite 200, Naperville, IL 60563 Phone: (312) 765-3998
