StraightTalkTrades

Straight talk.
No candy coating.

The stuff they don’t tell you until after.

Mortgages, rentals, quotes, contracts. The parts that cost people real money, written down plain — before you sign, not after.

See the guides

About me

I’m Michael. I’ve spent 30+ years in the trades, and I’ve got ADHD. Most days my brain runs ten jobs at once, and I’ve learned the hard way how to get through them anyway.

I’ve watched too many people get burned by stuff nobody bothered to explain until after they’d signed. So that’s what this is: straight talk, no candy coating, the stuff they don’t tell you until after.

Living it daily

Working with severe ADHD isn’t a productivity hack. This is the honest side of it, in my own words.

  • Focus

    I can frame a wall for eight hours straight and never look up. Ask me to sit through a 20-minute safety meeting and I've lost the thread by minute three.

  • Forgetting

    Drove 40 minutes to a job, got there and realized the one tool I needed was sitting on my kitchen counter. Not once. Plenty of times.

  • Paperwork

    The work itself is easy. Quotes, invoices and forms sit on my dash for weeks, because starting them feels like pushing a truck uphill.

  • People thinking you're lazy

    I'm not lazy. My brain just has no middle gear: it's full speed on what grabs it, or stalled on what doesn't. From the outside, those look the same.

What I bring

Guides first. Then whatever I’m worked up about that week — tools, videos, breakdowns, rants. The list keeps growing.

Why trust me

  • No sponsors pulling strings

    Nobody pays to be recommended here. If a deal is bad, it gets called a bad deal.

  • Opinion, labelled, with sources

    Anything that's my opinion is marked as my opinion. Where there are facts and paperwork behind it, you'll get pointed at them so you can check for yourself.

  • Thirty years on the tools

    I've been in the trade over 30 years in Ontario. I've seen the sales pitch from the other side of the table, and I know which parts get left out of it.

One straight tip a week. No spam.

Short email. One thing worth knowing. Unsubscribe whenever.

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