Costing s job

[Martin Carroll]

I am waiting for the plans on my latest renovation project to be processed and in the meantime the adjoining neighbour asked if I could lay a new oak floor for her.

I agreed to do this and top also get my plumber to look at (single pipe) heating system which wasn't working very well.

I agreed a day rate of £150 with her for the floor and plumbing works as I guessed (correctly) that it was a bit of a house of horrors.

She asked if while I was doing the job if I could also strip the woodchip wallpaper from the lounge. I agreed but told her at it was very likely that this could led to some plasterwork repairs.

Anyhow, the whole thing turned into a massive job, large parts of the plasterwork were damp and just fell off leading to lots of rendering and a complete reskim of the room.

By the time all the extras she requested had been done then a relatively minor job had turned into a 2 week + marathon.

Anyway I knew she was getting worried about the costs mounting so I told her that it wouldn't be a day rate anymore and I would come up with a price when everything was done.

Generally I don't do work for other people (partly because I hate the costing side) so I want to try and come up with a fair price (for both of us). So here is a basic list of the jobs I did (excluding the plumbing side):-

Clear furnishings and carpet. Remove skirting. Strip Wallpaper. Remove loose and failed plasterwork. Plasterboard and skim to ceiling. Render (with waterproof render) where necessary. Skim all walls. Fix plaster coving. Apply 2 coats of paint to ceiling and walls. Lay and level tanalised battens to floor. Lay oak floorboards. Prepare and fix new skirting. Box in new plumbing pipework Run telephone and TV cabling in to both ends of room. Rehang doors.

In all I was there 17 days (some of the time was spent helping the plumber) and a lot of these were long (10 hour) days.

I would welcome any views to what people would see as a reasonable price for this work.

I am in Wiltshire by the way as I guess there is difference in price depending where you are.

Cheers

Martin

[Martin Carroll]

Just thought it would help if I add that the room size is 7m x 3.5m

Cheers

Martin

[John Rumm]

I sympathise with the situation - having done work for neighbours in the past it can often be tricky to pick a price point which adequately compensates you while still keeping within the realms of neighbourliness.

Well to be fair, even if you charged the full whack of £2500 it sounds like she has still got a very good deal for the work done.

If you want to scale back a bit from that, you could perhaps analyse the jobs and apportion them into skilled and unskilled tasks, and charge a split rate. Hence things like clearing furniture, stripping paper, hacking off old plaster etc bill at a lower rate.

Often it helps to cost the job based on what would have been paid had you not done the work. If you look objectively, she would have paid quite a significant amount getting in specialist trades for each job - probably £800 or more for the plasterboard and plaster work alone, same again or more for the floor, prolly £500+ for the plumbing if it were several days work. Could be another £400 for a decorator etc. That is before you add in all the extra jobs and convenience factor of not having loads of strangers invading the house etc.

Your £150/day before tax sounded ok (or even a little low) being realistic. A little depends on what else you would have been doing with the time. If you want to go back with a lower price you could say approx £600/ five day week, and say £1800 - £2000 for the whole lot.

It does - but I don't think you will find many skilled trades working much below £130/day anywhere.

[John Rumm]

[Martin Carroll]

In article , Martin Carroll writes

Martin

[Martin Carroll]

In article , John Rumm writes

To be honest I was looking at that as one possible answer. I had already reduced the time for the couple of days that I had been helping the plasterer (who is also the plumber) and was basically just mixing up and cleaning up.

I agree with you on this but I am finding it difficult to convince Giles (who does the plumbing and plastering). He is from London and reckons that trade rates are dropping there because of the influx of Polish workers!

Martin