Sara DeVries: Herrick helped me find a handyman — and it can help you, too
My house is over 100 years old and the bathroom is typical for houses of that age; it's small. Very small. With two teenagers in the house, we need more space, so we decided to add a full bathroom with a soaker tub in the basement.
It's 75 percent complete and I can visualize myself actually taking a bath, without constant knocking on the door from someone else who needs the restroom, anyday now. The last major hurdle in the project is tiling the bathtub and shower surround.
Finding a tiler, it turns out, is not an easy task. Basic internet research brought up companies too large for a residential project. We texted, emailed, and called friends who told us they had recommendations — but life got busy and they forgot to reply, or they found out the person who did work for them in the past is no longer in the business of servicing individual homes.
When Google and our personal network failed to help us find a tiling contractor, we turned to a trusted library resource called Reference Solutions.
On the library website, I clicked the option to search the website and typed in “Reference Solutions” as a keyword. Once I accessed the database, I performed an advanced search by major industry groups within a five-mile radius of my ZIP code, and chose “construction."
Within construction, I selected “general contractors”, then “general contractors-single family," and finally selected “handyman services” to produce a list of prospective businesses in our geographic area. After visiting their websites, I was able to identify a short list of contacts with expertise in tiling. Reference Solutions helped us tackle that last hurdle and I'm one step closer to having a luxurious full bathroom.
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With information on over 80 million businesses in the United States, the Reference Solutions database has something for everyone and offers webinars to help maximize its benefit. Identify and research potential business prospects or marketing contacts, create mailing lists and discover job opportunities. Try this free database yourself for B2B uses, B2C uses, or to find a local handyman.
— Sara DeVries is community relations manager for Herrick District Library.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Sara DeVries: Herrick helped me find a handyman — and it can help you, too
