Concept demo — qualified contractor comparisons, screened profiles, project protection and province-wide coverage are illustrative concept copy.
What needs doing?
Start with a service, then refine the details.
Know the range before the quotes arrive · Illustrative guideFor example, many pros charge in the range of $90–$150 for a standard visit. Bigger project? Send photos and details and you'll get a proper quote — usually within a day.
Pros ready across Nova Scotia
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Concept demo: provider names, ratings, reviews, qualified contractor comparisons, screened profiles, project protection, coverage and guarantee terms are illustrative concept content — not third-party verified listings or live claims.
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A better way to hire.
One thoughtful request replaces a week of callbacks.
1
Show the real scope
Add a clear description, location, timing, and photos when helpful.
2
See qualified matches
Compare service areas, recent work, response time, and homeowner feedback.
3
Choose on your terms
Review quotes in one place. No surprise lead calls or pressure to book.
Posting a project is free. If you book through Tradepair, a 5% platform fee applies — quoted up front.
Trust, without the guesswork
Know who you're hiring before they knock.
“I could tell who actually served the Valley before wasting time on calls.”
Illustrative homeowner story · Kentville
“The job questions helped me compare quotes on the same scope.”
Illustrative business-owner story · Dartmouth
Satisfaction Guarantee
If paid work does not match the written scope, report it with photos within 7 days. We help the pro arrange a correction; if that cannot be resolved, eligible labour costs are reimbursed up to $1,000. Materials, pre-existing damage, and scope changes are excluded.
Illustrative concept — example guarantee terms shown for demo purposes
Better jobs. No lead-fee roulette.
Join free and get matched with ready-to-book homeowners and business owners in the communities you actually serve.
Free to join, no lead feesKeep more of every job instead of paying for names shared with competitors.
Matched on fit, not ad spendChoose your trades, service area, project size, and residential or commercial work.
Reviews that build repeat workVerified project reviews strengthen your profile after every completed job.
One simple fee — only when work books.
Joining Tradepair is free. No monthly subscription, no lead fees, no paying to rank. When a job books, it's 10% from you and 5% from the customer — that's the whole fee. No booked work, no fee.
The 10% applies to what you actually collect — if a customer doesn't pay, 10% of nothing is nothing.
Local reach, province-wide
From urban service calls to rural projects across Nova Scotia.
Costs, emergencies, and how Tradepair works — written for Nova Scotia.
Homeowner guide
How Much Does a Bathroom Renovation Cost in Halifax?
Everyone asks. The honest answer is "it depends," which is useless, so here's what it depends on — and the Halifax-specific stuff that surprises people.
The big cost drivers, in order
Scope is everything. A refresh — new toilet, vanity, fixtures, paint, maybe a prefab tub surround — is a fundamentally different job from a gut renovation down to the studs with the layout changed. Moving plumbing (toilet, shower drain) is the single biggest cost jump in most bathroom jobs, because it means opening floors and reworking drain lines, not just swapping fixtures.
Then tile. Tile labour is where bathroom budgets go to live or die. A simple tub surround in large-format tile is one thing; a curbless walk-in shower with a linear drain, niche, and heated floor is a different sport. Heated floors are popular here for good reason — stepping onto warm tile in a Halifax January sells itself — but they're a line item, not a freebie.
Electrical matters more than people expect: dedicated GFCI circuits, proper bathroom fan vented outside (not into the attic — we see this constantly in older homes), and lighting. And permits: HRM requires permits for plumbing and electrical changes. Any contractor who suggests skipping them is telling you who they are.
The Halifax wrinkles
A huge share of Halifax housing stock predates 1970 — North End Victorians, wartime houses, the west end. Open up a bathroom wall in one of these and you may find galvanized steel supply pipes (corroded from the inside, restricted flow) and cast-iron drains (heavy, rusting, often cracked at the hubs). A good contractor budgets contingency for this; a cheap quote pretends it doesn't exist. When the wall's open and the plumber finds galvanized pipe, you want it replaced while the wall is open — doing it later means opening the wall twice.
Bathrooms in these houses are also small. Small doesn't mean cheap — it often means harder, because there's no room to work and every inch of layout has to be planned. And many older Halifax homes have the bathroom stacked above the kitchen or another wet area, which is actually good news for drain runs.
Illustrative bands (not quotes)
For illustration only — every house is different, and these are not prices we're quoting:
Refresh (fixtures, vanity, paint, minor tile, no layout change): think low five figures.
Mid-range gut (down to studs, new tile throughout, same layout, quality fixtures): mid five figures.
Full reconfiguration (layout change, plumbing moves, curbless shower, heated floor): upper five figures and up.
The spread within each band is the contractor, the materials, and what the walls reveal.
Questions worth asking on the first call
Before anyone sets foot in your bathroom, ask: have you worked in homes like mine — pre-1970s, plaster walls, galvanized plumbing? Who's actually doing the work, you or a sub? What's your contingency plan if you open the wall and find something ugly? And how do you handle payments — deposit, milestones, holdback? The answers tell you more than the quote does. A contractor who's done twenty North End bathrooms will talk about galvanized pipe before you bring it up.
Red flags in a bathroom quote
No permit mentioned for plumbing or electrical changes. A single lump-sum number with no breakdown — you can't compare it and you can't tell what's excluded. Full payment demanded up front; a deposit is normal, the whole job in advance is not. And the biggest one: a quote given sight unseen, over the phone, for a gut renovation. Nobody can price what's behind your walls without looking.
How to get quotes you can compare
Write the scope down before anyone quotes. Same tile spec, same fixture list, same layout — then the numbers mean something. If one quote is dramatically lower, ask what's excluded, not what's included. And get it in writing: scope, price, timeline, payment schedule.
That's exactly why Tradepair's project requests use one shared scope — so the three quotes you get are quotes for the same job. Post your project free, and compare apples to apples.
Emergency guide
Burst Pipe at 2 AM: What to Do in the First 10 Minutes
It's January. It's -15. You hear water where water shouldn't be, or you wake up to the ceiling dripping. Here's the sequence. Do it in order.
Minute 0–2: Kill the water
Find your main shutoff and turn it clockwise until it stops. In most Halifax homes it's in the basement, on the front foundation wall, near where the water line comes in — usually right by the water meter. If you've never looked for it, go look today, in daylight, when nothing's wrong. Put a tag on it. In a panic at 2 AM is the worst time to meet your shutoff valve for the first time.
If the break is on a single fixture and you can see a local shutoff (under a sink, behind a toilet), use that instead — it keeps the rest of the house live. But when in doubt, kill the main.
Minute 2–5: Drain the lines, protect the electrical
Open the faucets on the lowest floor to drain remaining pressure, and flush toilets once. This won't stop an already-burst pipe from having leaked, but it stops more water from feeding the break.
Now the rule that matters: if water is anywhere near your electrical panel, outlets, or light fixtures, stay out of the water and don't touch anything electrical. Water and electricity don't negotiate. If the panel area is wet, that's a call to an electrician as well as a plumber — and you wait for one of them before going back in.
Minute 5–10: Contain, document, call
Move what you can. Buckets under drips, towels at the edges. Then photograph everything — the break, the water damage, the rooms affected. Your insurance adjuster will want this, and "before cleanup" photos are worth more than descriptions later.
Then call for help. Tell the dispatcher four things: where the break is, whether the main water is off, whether there's water near anything electrical, and your address. "Burst pipe, water's off, basement, no electrical involved" gets you the right truck faster than a panicked paragraph.
Why this happens here
Halifax gets the worst combination for pipes: deep cold snaps followed by thaws, over and over. Pipes in exterior walls, unheated crawlspaces, and garages are the usual victims — and our older housing stock has plenty of all three. During a real cold snap, letting a faucet drip slightly and keeping cabinet doors open under sinks on exterior walls genuinely helps. It's not folk wisdom; moving water freezes slower.
The next 48 hours
Once the immediate crisis is handled, the job isn't done. Get air moving — open windows if the weather allows, run fans, and get a dehumidifier on it if you have one. Our damp coastal climate grows mold fast, and a soaked wall cavity in March will punish you by May. Pull up any wet rugs or mats; they trap moisture against floors.
Call your insurance company within a day or two. Most homeowner policies cover sudden pipe bursts (they generally don't cover slow leaks you ignored for months — another reason those "before cleanup" photos matter). An adjuster will want the photos, the plumber's invoice, and a description of what happened and when. Keep every receipt: emergency callout, materials, even the dehumidifier rental.
Then get the actual repair done properly, not just the emergency patch. A clamp or temporary coupling stops the bleeding; the permanent fix — replacing the compromised section, and ideally any other pipe of the same age in the same run — is a separate job. Ask the plumber straight up: "Is the rest of this pipe on borrowed time?" In a 60-year-old house with galvanized supply lines, the honest answer is often yes.
If you rent
Your sequence is shorter: shut off the water if you can do it safely, contain what you can, photograph everything — then call your landlord or property manager immediately, day or night. A burst pipe is their emergency, not just yours. Follow up in writing (text or email counts) so there's a record of when you reported it. Don't authorize major work yourself; that's the owner's call and their bill.
When it's us you call
We're building a 24/7 emergency hotline for exactly this night — one call, and an on-call pro gets dispatched while you're still mopping. It's in development now. Until then: know where your shutoff is. That's the whole post, really.
For contractors
How Tradepair Makes Money: Our 10%, Explained in Plain English
Every contractor we've talked to asks some version of: "Okay, but what's the catch?" Fair question. Here's the whole business model, no fine print.
Free to join. 10% when work books.
Listing your business on Tradepair costs nothing. No monthly subscription, no setup fee, no charge to appear in search. When a job books through the platform, we take 10% of what you collect from the customer. The customer pays a 5% platform fee on top, quoted up front before they book — so the price they see is the price they pay, and your quote is never quietly shaved.
Here's the part that matters: the 10% applies to what you actually collect. Customer cancels? No fee. Customer doesn't pay? 10% of $0 is $0. We only earn when you earn. That's not a slogan, it's the arithmetic.
An illustrative example
Say you quote $2,000 for a job and the customer books it. The customer sees $2,100 ($2,000 + 5% platform fee, shown as its own line). You collect $2,000 and we take $200. You keep $1,800. Tradepair's total take is $300 — $200 from you and $100 from the customer. Fees visible to everyone, on every job. That's the entire model.
Why not a monthly subscription?
Because subscriptions misalign everything. When a platform charges you every month whether or not you get work, its incentive is to keep you paying, not to keep you booked. You've lived this: the quiet months still cost the same as the busy ones. A commission model means our revenue only exists when jobs happen — which is the only thing that should matter to either of us.
And no, you can't pay to rank higher.
This one's structural, not promotional. Some marketplaces let contractors buy visibility — featured spots, boosted placement, pay-per-lead auctions. We don't, and we won't. Ranking on Tradepair runs on completed-job reviews, response time, and verified badges (licensed, insured, ID-checked). A better-rated competitor outranks a bigger wallet, every time. If we ever changed that, we'd deserve to lose your trust.
What the 10% actually pays for
It's a fair question: if it's only 10%, what are we doing with it? Payments infrastructure (so money moves safely between strangers), the review and verification systems, dispute support when something goes wrong, and the 24/7 emergency hotline we're building. None of that is free to run. The 10% is the whole budget for all of it — which is also why there are no other fees hiding anywhere. If we needed more revenue, we'd have to invent more fees. We'd rather stay lean.
Objections we've heard, answered straight
"What if the customer finds me on Tradepair and then books me direct to dodge the fee?" It'll happen. We're not going to pretend otherwise or threaten anyone over it. Our bet is that the booking protection, the verified review, and the payment handling are worth 10% often enough that most jobs stay on the platform. If we're wrong about that, the model fails and we'll have earned it.
"Do I have to run payments through you?" For the commission to work, booked jobs settle through the platform — that's how the 10% is calculated and how the review gets tied to a real completed job. Your existing clients and your own leads are yours; we're not claiming a cut of work we didn't touch.
"What if I just want leads, not bookings?" Then we're probably not your marketplace. We're built around completed jobs — that's what the reviews, the verification, and the fee all attach to. Lead-selling is a different business with different incentives, and we've chosen ours.
What happens as we grow
Here's our commitment, in writing: the fee structure doesn't change under you. No introductory rate that doubles next year, no new "visibility packages," no pay-to-rank bolted on once we have leverage. The day we start charging contractors for placement is the day this whole pitch becomes a lie, and we'd rather stay small than do that. Growth, for us, means more booked jobs at the same 10% — not a bigger cut of yours.
The short version
We're betting that the fair model wins: free to join, one visible fee, only on paid work, ranked by reputation. If that sounds like the marketplace you've been waiting for, come build your free profile. We'll be here when the work books.
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