When to Turn Down a Local Job

Start with your body, not with the money. If the job can put you in hospital, nothing else about it matters, and no amount you are short this month changes the arithmetic of a fall.

From there the filter runs in a fixed order, and each gate is a yes or no rather than a judgment call.

The four refuse-on-sight categories

Unsafe. Anything above your own standing reach. Roofs. Ladders. Live electrical circuits. Gas appliances. Chainsaws and tree felling. Anything requiring you to lift a person, or to lift alone what two people should carry. These are not a matter of being careful. Ladder and gutter work in particular gets treated as an easy earner and it is the one that hurts people; the reasons are in why gutter work at height is a different job.

Unlicensed. If the work touches gas, electricity, water systems, structure, roofs, trees, pest control, food, medicines, children in your sole care, or driving people for money, there is a permission gate somewhere. What that gate is depends entirely on where you live, and the people who can tell you are named in the license, insurance and registration checks.

Unclear. A job with no boundary. Just tidy it up with nothing that says where tidy stops. A price that depends on what is under the decking, behind the plasterboard or at the bottom of the pile. You can sometimes convert these by going back with a written scope for the visible part only.

Unpaid in advance. You are asked to buy materials, hire a machine or travel a long way with your own money before anything is agreed. If money is leaving your pocket before any has entered it, the risk has been moved onto the person who can least carry it. When the request to pay first comes from someone offering you the work rather than a customer buying it, that is a different animal entirely, described in spotting a fee-before-work setup.

Behavior before the job that predicts the argument after it

Watch what happens before any work starts. These are things you can observe, not predictions.

Haggling before the scope exists is the loudest one. A person negotiating the price of a job neither of you has defined is negotiating something else. So is the customer who spends the first ten minutes on how badly the last person did it, without ever saying what was actually wrong.

Then: refusing to give an address until you commit. Wanting you to start right now, today, with no explanation of the hurry. Wanting to be out while you work, on a first job, in a house you have never entered. A partner in the background who has clearly not agreed to any of it.

None of these means the person is dishonest. Each one means the conversation at the end will be harder than the one you are having now, and you can price that in or decline it.

If your gut has gone quiet and flat during a doorstep conversation, that is information gathered faster than you can articulate it. You are allowed to act on it without justifying it to anybody.

Jobs beyond your skill that look simple from the doorstep

A dripping tap that turns out to be a seized valve behind a cabinet. A quick paint over what is actually damp. A fence post set in a meter of concrete. A blocked drain that is blocked somewhere you cannot reach. A dishwasher that has to be disconnected from a water supply. A piano.

The pattern is the same each time. The customer describes it in one short sentence and is vague about everything behind it, because they do not know either.

The defense is physical. Ask to see it. Touch it, open the cupboard, look under the sink, put a hand on the post. Then say yes or no with the thing in front of you rather than from the doorstep.

A job you can start and cannot finish is worse than a job you refused, because now their kitchen is in pieces and it is your name on it. Half-done work also has to be undone by whoever comes next, and they will tell the customer that.

Work that pays but costs you the street

Some jobs pay once and quietly close doors either side of the one you worked at. Machinery running early on a Sunday. Blocking a shared driveway. Burning garden waste next to somebody's washing. Spraying near a boundary. Taking down a hedge that two households share.

The boundary dispute deserves its own mention. If a customer wants a fence, a hedge or a tree dealt with and the neighbor has a view about it, you are being hired into somebody else's argument, and the neighbor will remember your face rather than the person who paid you.

There is also the customer the street already warns you about. When two separate households mention the same name unprompted, you have been handed information that would have cost you a two weeks to learn yourself.

How to decline and keep the next job alive

Decline fast, decline once, and name what you would do instead. I do not do ladder or roof work at all. I will do the ground-level clearing if that is useful to you. A refusal with an offer attached leaves the relationship intact.

Do not invent an excuse. Saying you are busy when you are not invites them back next week with the same job, and then you have to refuse twice. Do not apologize at length either, and do not explain your reasoning past one sentence, because a long justification sounds like a position that can be argued with.

If you know somebody who genuinely does that trade, give the name. If you do not, say so rather than passing on someone you would not stand behind, because a bad referral comes back to you and not to them.

The job you take with the ladder half declined

Sometimes you are going to take a job you should not, because the rent is due this week. That decision is yours and nobody who is not short should lecture you about it. What you can do is take the specific job and not the specific risk.

Before you start: put the scope in a message so there is one written version. Photograph everything before you touch it. Agree a stop point in time as well as in scope. If materials are involved, take that part of the money up front. And tell somebody where you are going and when you expect to be back, particularly for a first-time customer in an empty house.

Then hold one line regardless of the money. Take the ground-level half of the job, decline the ladder half, and say so before you start rather than at the moment they hand you the ladder.

If it goes wrong anyway, the recovery has a sequence and it starts in the first five minutes: what to do after damage on a job.

Do not go up the ladder. There is no version of that job that is worth the fall.