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Sure, people chuckle when Chuck Utter rides up to a house on his red scooter, wearing a matching red helmet and black gloves. But the 68-year-old general housing contractor chuckles with them. Since he bought the new wheels in July, he has spent about one-eighth the amount he used to spend to fill up his big pickup truck.

Utter spends most of his days driving between the two to four remodeling projects he manages at one time throughout Central Iowa as owner of Professional Home Improvement LLC (PHI), making sure work is done properly, coordinating activities and helping get extra supplies, though his small vehicle can get cramped with shopping bags. So for him, it didn’t make sense to pay $350 a month in gas “just to watch.”

Since he bought PHI “for a song” seven years ago from a guy who was moving to Atlanta, he has transformed it into a general contracting business, where he will sit down with homeowners to determine all the home improvement projects they want done, prioritize which ones should get done first and then line up the subcontractors to do the work. His biggest help is his son, Doug, who will eventually take over the business, and his business partner, Rick Krause.

But with an eclectic career that includes stints as an industrial arts teacher, real estate agent, heating and cooling salesman and handyman, he knows enough about everything in a house to do most of the work himself.

“We had four children five years apart,” Utter said, “so every house we ever lived in, I had to build a bedroom.”

He still helps with the hard labor when a project gets behind schedule, but at his age, he prefers consulting with clients, such as drawing upon his real estate background to help them determine which project will add the most resale value.

Despite a downturn in the housing market, PHI is on its way to having its best year yet, with two full kitchen remodels lined up and a lot of window replacements, as well as completing more than 15 bathroom projects in the past 14 months. Most of Utter’s work comes from repeat customers or referrals. Participating in the Business Network International group has generated $750,000 in new business over the past six years.

Utter has his standards – if he doesn’t connect with a homeowner, he won’t do the project, and he only books a couple of months in advance. “If I were smarter, we’d book further than that,” he said, “I just have a hard time when you want to do something, putting you off for a long time.”

He also refuses to buy into the negative housing trends, reverting to his “think positive” attitude. “When I started selling – now you got me going – I moved from Osage, Iowa, to Fort Dodge, Iowa, with three kids and a pregnant wife to take a straight commission job,” he said, “and my attitude was, I have got to have the right attitude. So Mondays to this day are my favorite day of the week. The reason was I wanted to make a sale on Monday, because if I did, it took all the pressure off of me for the rest of the week. … So I choose not to participate in the recession.”

The biggest challenge Utter faces is the “green” movement, which has brought many new products into the marketplace, many of which don’t have a track record. He is in the process of replacing a $5,000 deck a year and a half after its construction because the decking material had problems.

“You just get to the point where I’m nervous about trying new things,” he said, “and that’s not me at my age. I’m a plunger. I don’t stay inside the box, but we’ve just gotten burned a few times on things like that and as a result, I’m very careful with it.”

Often, he has had to educate clients. For example, even though advocates say bamboo is harder than oak, only one kind of bamboo is harder than oak, and it has to go through a heat process.

This is when Utter uses the phrase “I’m going to tell you what I think, because then I don’t have to remember what I told you.” He doesn’t mind sharing his thoughts with clients and letting them participate in the remodeling – so long as they don’t slow down his work – and even leaves a notebook on job sites for clients to write down problems to discuss.

He often works on homes that were originally built in the 1950s or earlier, which creates unique challenges and delays. “People say they don’t build them like they used to,” Utter said. “I say, ‘Thank God they don’t.'”

But Utter finds these kinds of projects fun. He’s not looking to retire anytime soon, though he and his wife, Nancy, escape anywhere south for a month in the winter.

The scooter is probably enough adventure for now.

“You’ve got to assume that everybody’s going to turn in front of you,” he said, “and somebody’s always going to come out from the left or the right. … And just because somebody makes eye contact, don’t think they saw you.”