Helping a friend remodel a house can start with a simple favor and end with a surprisingly complicated question: was that free help, or was it work worth paying for?
A Saturday spent carrying drywall is one thing. Several weekends installing flooring, framing walls, or doing electrical work can look very different. The answer does not come down to how tired the helper feels afterward. It usually depends on what the two people agreed to before the work started, what the helper actually did, and the laws that apply where the property sits.
