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Our Workmanship Guarantee Is Backed Bythe Man Who Did the Work

A national chain can promise you a year. What it cannot promise is that the person who answers the phone is the person who held the drill. Here, that is the same guy.

What the guarantee actually is

Here is the whole idea in one sentence: if the work we did fails because of how we did it, we come back and fix it, and you do not pay for our return labor.

That covers our labor and our workmanship. The cut, the fit, the fastening, the seal, the finish, the way a fixture was mounted, the way a joint was made up. It is the part of the job that is genuinely ours. It does not cover a manufacturer defect, a material you supplied, a condition that was already there when we walked in, or damage from something that happened after we left. Those all have their own paths, and the table below shows which is which.

The term of the guarantee is written on your estimate and repeated on your invoice for that specific job. We put it on your paperwork rather than on a marketing page on purpose. The honest term for a drywall patch in a heated hallway is not the honest term for exterior trim paint going into an Indiana winter, and we would rather give you the real number for your job than publish one number that flatters some work and overstates the rest. Ask before you sign. It will be in writing before any money changes hands.

Covered, not covered, and who handles what

Most warranty arguments in this trade are not really about warranties. They are about two people who never agreed on what was being warranted. So here it is on one grid, before the job instead of after it.

If your situation is not on this list, call and ask. A straight answer costs us nothing and saves you a week of wondering.

How to make a claim

Call 317-893-3717 or email nicholas@nhsindy.com. That is the entire process. There is no warranty department, no ticket portal, and nobody reading you a script.

A return visit to look at a warranty question is not a billable trip. Our $150 trip minimum applies to new work, not to standing behind work we already did.

• Say what is wrong and roughly when it started. Approximate is fine.
• Send one clear photo if you can. A picture usually saves a trip's worth of guessing.
• Have the invoice number or the date of the work if it is handy. If not, we can find it on our end.
• We schedule the look during normal hours, Monday through Saturday, 8:00 to 6:00. We do not run after-hours or emergency service and we will not pretend otherwise while you are standing in water. If it is actively flooding, shut the supply off and call an emergency service first, then call us.
• If it is our workmanship, we fix it. If it is not, we tell you what it actually is, in writing if you want it.

Why an owner-operated guarantee is worth more than a franchise promise

The national handyman franchises publish a one-year workmanship warranty and then tell you to contact your local franchise within one year. Read that again. The promise is national, the performance is local, and the local owner, the dispatcher, and the technician who actually did your job are three different people, any of whom may have turned over by the time you call.

Nick's Handyman Service has worked Central Indiana since 2005 and has been an LLC since 2018. Nicholas Studebaker does the work or supervises it. When you call about a repair from last spring, you are talking to the man who was on his knees under that sink. He remembers the seized shutoff, the joist that sat two inches off where the plans said, and what he told you at the time. There is no file to pull and no story to reconstruct.

That cuts both ways, and it should. An owner-operator has no brand to hide behind. Our BBB A+ accreditation and 73 Google reviews at 4.9 stars are attached to one person, in one county, who is going to run into you at the hardware store.

Your paperwork is part of the guarantee

Indiana's Home Improvement Contracts Act (IC 24-5-11) requires a written contract before a contractor performs residential work costing more than $150. It has to name both parties, describe the work, state the total cost, and give start and completion dates, and the contractor has to sign it before the homeowner signs or puts any money down. Skipping that is treated as a deceptive act under Indiana's consumer sales law.

We follow it, and not only because it is the law. That written scope is what makes a workmanship guarantee mean anything at all. A guarantee with no written description of the work is an argument waiting to happen, because a year later two people will remember the same conversation two different ways. When the scope reads reset toilet, new wax ring and supply line, re-caulk base, there is nothing left to dispute about what we said we would do.

Worth knowing separately: Indiana law gives property owners a long window, up to ten years from substantial completion, to bring a construction defect claim. That is state law, not our guarantee term, and the two are not the same thing. It is one more reason we keep the estimate, the invoice, and the job photos on file.

Materials, manufacturers, and who warrants what

Three separate warranties can be live on a single job, and mixing them up is how people end up angry at the wrong party. Ours covers our labor, our install, our finish. The manufacturer's covers the water heater tank, the faucet cartridge, the opener, the appliance. And material bought online and handed to us at the door carries nothing at all from us except the installation.

When we supply the material, we keep the model and serial with your invoice, and if the unit fails inside the manufacturer's term we open that claim alongside you and install the replacement. The manufacturer covers the part. Whether our labor to swap it is covered depends on the job, and we will tell you which side of that line you are on before you buy, not after it fails.

If you buy the material yourself, and plenty of customers do for good reasons, we will install it and we will stand behind the installation. We will not warrant a bargain vanity or a cartridge we did not choose. If we think a part is going to fail, we say so before it goes in and we note it on the invoice. That is not us covering ourselves. That is us telling you what we think while you can still return it.

What Indiana weather does, and what no guarantee can stop

Indianapolis runs roughly 20 to 25 freeze-thaw cycles in a normal winter, from about November through March. Water finds a hairline gap, freezes overnight, expands about nine percent, and levers that gap wider. Do that two dozen times a year and you understand why exterior caulk, deck sealer, and south-facing trim paint are maintenance items rather than permanent fixes.

No honest guarantee covers that. What we do guarantee is the workmanship inside it: surface prepped, joint cut to the right width and depth, backer rod where it belongs, the correct product for the substrate, applied above the manufacturer's minimum temperature. If a bead lets go in six weeks because it was tooled badly or shot at 38 degrees against the label, that is workmanship and that one is ours.

This is also why we are saying it in early September. Exterior painting, deck staining, pressure washing, and gutter cleaning all have a window in Central Indiana that closes around the first sustained cold snap. Work done inside the window lasts. Work squeezed in after it does not, and we would rather move you to spring than warrant something the thermometer has already decided.

Commercial work orders and facility managers

For facility managers and national FM partners the guarantee works identically, just against your paperwork instead of ours. NHS has run work orders for All American Facilities Management, IFS, Total Wine, Valvoline, Papa Murphy's, Caliber Collision, JFB Construction, Crown Staffing, and US Navy recruiting offices, on tickets ranging from $150 to over $23,000.

Every visit carries before and after photo documentation, IVR check-in and check-out where the client requires it, and a single invoice on multi-site rollouts. Those photos are the warranty record. When a site manager calls back six weeks later because the door closer is dragging again, we pull the closeout photos for that work order and know within a minute whether we are looking at our own adjustment, a new impact, or a door that was already out of square when the dispatch came in.

To open a claim on commercial work, reply on the original work order thread or call 317-893-3717 with the WO number. COI and W-9 are on file, we work Net-30 and Net-45, and the $150 trip minimum applies to new work. A return under the workmanship guarantee is not a new trip charge.

Common Questions