ripping you off..........how? you got your free estimate (which you expected) I never said you would get a free kitchen design. designs take experience, knowledge and time. my time is worth the money you would spend.
Especially since I am | sure the actual bid doesn't always match up with estimate after you get | exactly everything down on paper.
my estimates are written in stone on paper or verbally
I say give the window shoppers the free estimate without a plan and if they want a plan, charge them $300 for it and it is NOT deducted from the contract price. at least this way you are being paid for your time and you didn't waste more than 20 min. on a plan that a window shopper is expecting for free.
I usually give free estimates at the time of looking at the job, then I inform them about the "design fee" to get a plan.
works like a charm it usually weeds out the garden so to speak.
| > > My friend is in the market for a kitchen remodel. He says Home Depot wants | > > $100.00 to just come out and measure. I've never heard of this before. Is | > > this common? | >
| > Just did this. The money is refunded/applied to your order. | | Which is pretty standard. I started charging for estimates a long | time ago. Same deal. You sign up, you get a refund. Cuts down on | the tire kickers. It also lets people know that you value your time, | and you expect them to do the same. | | R |
I wanted them to reuse the existing one. Had a little bend on the cap that I fixed. Cap looked fine and was on for who knows how long and no rust.
I imagine you'd consider a "ridiculous" price to be any price that is higher than what you want to pay.
Let's see if I've got this straight. You misread my post, attempt to say that I advised not getting bids, then when I say that it's not worth my time to take a ladder off of a truck for $40, it's an attitude?
There are at least a couple of attitudes here. My attitude is that my time is money - that I do fine work and expect to get paid accordingly. Your attitude seems to be that getting several bids and picking a low average somehow enables you to determine the value of my work. That's just nonsense.
I pay my plumber $100 an hour and my electrician $90. These are my subs. I understand the value of good work and I'm willing to pay for it. Not thrilled about the bill sometimes, but I've never regretted it.
Isn't the system great? I get to choose who I work with and so do you. You and I would never get past the initial phone call. Saves everybody's time.
R
I know the cad drawing comes after from the computer. But what I was trying to say was that the $100 did not produce any kind of formal write up just a recording of the square feet in the flooring order department. The resulting number would have inflated the materials cost and the labor cost which at the time was $9 a square foot for boh.
We bought pergo at $2.50 a square foot and installed it ourselves using our own measurements and ordering 10% more.
What?
How many "guys"? Assuming it's two (the most optimistic assumption for your case), that's only $50.00 an hour. And you're not willing to pay them for the travel time, and the wear and tear on their equipment. Let alone the chance they took that there was some complication on your job that would mean a delay or the need for more "guys" or equipment.
See, this is the problem with this kind of reasoning. You only consider what happens in front of your face, and don't think about their business as a whole.
Banty
You hired a couple of handy people. They probably go dumpster diving when not attempting to "do anything for a buck".
I'm amazed how you figure up worker's labor. No travel time, no overhead, just pure profit. Ignorance never ceases to amaze me.
I wouldn't let bums do work on my property, let alone step on my roof, for the simple fact of liability issues.
Actually they didn't. Aside from the fact there were multiple workers if you count in travel time and general overhead they made a lot less than that. That is one of the biggest things people don't understand about business and the main reason why so many startups fail.
So a business shouldn't even charge enough to cover their actual cost of doing business?
For a professional you seem to be totally unaware of the concept of overhead and expenses.
Lets say your professional billing rate is $100/hour. Do you make $100 for an hours work? Or does the $100 also cover stuff like office expense, education, staff etc?
I wanted something not off the self for plumbing, and Lowes wanted a few bucks to have a contractor to lay out the work. Before even buying anything.
tom @
You're not paying attention. Guys is plural, my plumber works alone.
If the guys sleep in your garage, they split that $50 for a half hour's work. Otherwise they probably spent another fifteen or twenty minutes traveling, and possiblly a fair bit more. Other things you conveniently ignore are overhead, liabilty (the _risk_, not the insurance cost), and certainly not the least important, the PIA factor. Your PIA factor is astoundingly high.
You're not paying attention. I would have screened you out in the initial phone call. Frankly, you wouldn't even know about me since I don't advertise and you obviously don't run in the circles I do. You consider using Home Depot for installations. 'Nuff said.
R
Lucky for you that you have some in-laws, otherwise you wouldn't have a nifong clue how to locate a good contractor.
RIt's not hard to find good contractors. Just ask neighbors and friends and cross off any sh***y ones that wont show up, cost too much, bad attitudes, etc. This is why I do as much as I can myself. If the chimney were lower I'd have put the cap up myself. Yeah I could replace a door but the nuisance factor makes the price I got reasonable to me.
You really don't have any concept of overhead, thank you for verifying that.
Very poor analogy, to say the least.
You have no concept what it costs to run a school. I've never heard of a school with the only overhead, being a teacher's salary. That's as absurd as you believing a plumbers only overhead is their hourly rate.
Please do share your experience, where a school operates with no administrative costs, utility costs, upkeep, etc.
This should be good.
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