I second the Angie's List recommendation. If you go with only people who have an A rating and many reviews, I've never gotten poor service. Also, when you think about the hundreds or thousands you could lose with a bad contractor, the annual fee for access is a drop in the bucket.
My fiance and I have good and bad experience with Angie's list. The plumber we hired from Angie's was excellent, but the painter was bad, had to repaint everything ourselves again. But we had good lock using Nextdoor to find an excellent painter.
