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Winter: Do your home-repair homework on the Web

Published September 2, 2006 at midnight

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In my 'hood, when you need the name of a good plumber or tree trimmer or cement contractor, you go to Anne Hamilton on the corner.

Hamilton, who's retired, is the kind of neighbor money can't buy. Not only does she keep her eye on the comings and goings around here, but her yard and home are spotless, and she always is happy to share her contacts for handymen or whatever.

But not everyone has an Anne Hamilton. So whom do you ask for home-repair recommendations?

In Denver, 10,000 people use Angie's List, often described as a kind of electronic grapevine for homeowners.

Angie's List is a Web site where consumers in a given city report on their experiences with plumbers, chimney sweeps, carpet cleaners, roofers, window cleaners and businesses in any of 250 other home-repair and maintenance categories.

Subscribers to Angie's List grade businesses much like on a school report card, giving them A's through F's on overall job, price, quality of work, responsiveness and punctuality. They also can add comments, like whether the contractor cleaned up after the job or left his cigarette butts in the yard.

Sherri Sloan, who moved to Park Hill two months ago from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., recently used Angie's List to find companies to build a cedar fence and paint her house.

"Just fabulous" is how she summed up the experience. Both contractors were prompt, thorough and charged a fair price, she said. "They were here the next day. You sure don't get that kind of service in Florida," she said.

Angie's List is up and running in 70 cities, with a subscriber base of 500,000. Denver is a recent addition, so many of the companies I searched for on a recent trial run either weren't listed or had only one or two reviews.

But in cities such as Columbus, Ohio, where 33-year-old Angie Hicks launched the company in 1995, subscribers can read as many as 500 reviews on a single carpet-cleaning business, for example.

You have to subscribe - it's a $10 sign-up fee and $4.95 a month for a year - to use Angie's List. And then you're asked to review companies you use. The limit is one review per business category every six months, to guard against ballot-box-stuffing. A staff of 200 keeps an eagle eye out for possible plants by business owners.

But cheating is not a big problem, in part because the site attracts stand-up, community-minded people, Hicks said in a phone interview from headquarters in Indianapolis.

"Members give reports because they feel it's their social obligation," she said. "They control the list, and we rely on them to keep it going and updated."

In recent years, Angie's List staffers have begun looking at which home services and products draw the most complaints and which draw the most praise.

In 2005, Hicks said, home warranties were far and away the product or service that members complained about most, followed by large home-building and remodeling projects, hurricane shutter installation, and water and smoke damage mitigation.

The products and services that garnered the highest satisfaction were wallpaper hanging, window cleaning, glass-block installation, pressure washing, wallpaper removal, insulation installation, trash hauling, gutter cleaning, and topsoil/mulching application.

Angie's List has plenty of competitors across the country, including Golden-based ServiceMagic.com.

ServiceMagic, which is free, works on a slightly different model from Angie's List but has connected more than 6 million U.S. homeowners with contractors since it started in 1999.

ServiceMagic gets high marks from News writers in both the business and Home Front sections.

The site offers consumers information on businesses as diverse as maid services and remodelers specializing in countertops. Homeowners can get a list of contractors in their area who have been screened for credit background, insurance and state and city licenses. They can also see photos of their work.

I haven't needed to use either ServiceMagic or Angie's List, since the gold standard of contractor references lives right down the street.

But it probably wouldn't be a bad idea for Anne to think in broader terms. AllAnnsMen.com has a certain appeal. So does .

Home repairs, after all, are forever.