The plumber finishes Tuesday. The cabinet installer arrives Wednesday, finds the wall still open, charges for the trip, and reschedules into a week that no longer has room. Nobody did bad work. Somebody just never wrote down the order.
Write it down before you book anything: a list of who is coming after whom, with dates, and what has to be finished before each arrival, sent to all of them at once. That document is the whole job. Everything else on this page is what goes into it.
Why multi-vendor jobs fail
They rarely fail because a vendor was bad. They fail because vendor two arrived before vendor one was finished, found the work incomplete, charged for the trip, and rescheduled into a week that no longer had room.
One trade is a scheduling problem you can hold in your head. Three trades is a dependency problem, and dependencies do not survive a phone call.
Order the trades correctly
The general sequence, roughly, for interior work:
- Demolition and anything that opens a wall
- Rough plumbing
- Rough electrical
- Heating and cooling rough-in
- Inspection, where a permit is involved
- Insulation and drywall
- Paint
- Flooring
- Cabinets and fixtures
- Finish plumbing and finish electrical
- Appliances
- Final clean
Two rules survive almost every job. Anything inside a wall goes before anything that closes the wall. And finish trades come back at the end, which means your plumber is coming twice, and both visits belong on the schedule from day one.
The mistake that costs the most is scheduling flooring before paint. Painters drip. Everyone knows this and it happens constantly, because flooring had a slot open.
Decide who owns the schedule
There are three honest answers, and picking one deliberately is most of the job.
A general contractor owns it. You pay a markup, which stings most on a small job, and you get one phone number and one person answerable for the whole thing. Usually the right call once a job runs into five figures, and any time a permit and an inspection are involved.
You own it. You write the sequence, you book each trade, you confirm each handoff. Fine for two or three trades if you are reachable during the day. Expensive in attention.
The lead trade owns it. On a kitchen or a bath, the trade doing the most work will often coordinate the others for a small fee or for nothing, because their own schedule depends on it. Ask. Landlords rarely do.
What does not work is nobody owning it while everybody assumes somebody does.
Note that on larger jobs the licensing question is not optional. California’s minor-work exemption sits at $1,000 in combined labor and materials on a single project as of January 1, 2026 (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 7048), and it does not apply where a permit is required or where a job has been split into smaller contracts to stay under the number. A multi-trade renovation is not minor work.
Give every vendor the same three things
Send it once, to all of them, in one message:
- The full sequence with dates, including the trades that are not theirs
- Who arrives before them, and what has to be done for them to start
- The tenant’s contact details, access instructions, and whether the unit is occupied
The middle one is the one that changes behavior. A vendor who knows the cabinet installer is arriving Thursday will tell you Tuesday that they will not be ready, which is a phone call you want on Tuesday. A vendor who only knows their own date tells you nothing until Thursday.
Occupied units change everything
If the tenant is still living there, the job has a second set of constraints.
Every visit still needs notice. In California that is written notice with the date, an approximate time, and the purpose, with 24 hours presumed reasonable (Cal. Civ. Code § 1954(d)(1)), and it applies to each vendor visit, not once for the project. Our California entry rules page covers the detail.
Group visits into blocks rather than scattering them across three weeks. A tenant who loses four separate mornings is a tenant who will not renew, and a run of entries even with proper notice each time can raise a harassment argument. And tell the tenant what the sequence is, in plain terms, at the start. They are living inside your schedule.
If water or power will be off, say for how long, in advance, in writing. That single message prevents most of the complaints a renovation generates.
When vendor two finds vendor one’s mistake
It will happen. The electrician says the plumber’s rough-in is in the wrong place.
Get a photo before anything is touched. Then get both on a call, or in one message thread, and do not relay it yourself, because relaying a technical disagreement through a non-tradesperson turns a ten-minute conversation into two days. Most of these resolve immediately once the two people who know the work are talking. That is the same principle as handing off tenant and vendor scheduling, applied between trades.
Do not pay for the disputed portion until it is resolved. That is not aggression. It is the only pressure you have, and every trade expects it.
Keep the whole job in one record
A multi-vendor job produces several invoices, several visits, and usually a change or two. If those live in separate email threads, you will not be able to answer what the job cost or when it finished, and both questions come up at tax time.
Keep it as one job on the unit with each vendor’s visit and invoice attached. LeaseRooster’s work orders and scheduling hold the visits and the invoices against the property, so the project has one record rather than five.
If you are still assembling the roster of trades to call, how to find a reliable vendor covers the vetting, and keeping tenants updated covers what to send while the work is running.
This is general information, not legal advice. Rules change and local ordinances vary. Confirm current requirements with your city, county, or an attorney before you act.