How I price a job, and why I won't guess over the phone

The most common question I get is some version of “roughly, what would that run me?” It is a fair question. I would ask it too. I still will not answer it off a phone call, and I would rather tell you why than have you sit there thinking I am dodging you.

The same repair can be a morning or it can be two days

Take a hole in a hallway wall where a bookshelf came off. The wall is flat, the texture is a common one, the paint is a color I can match or you still have the can out in the garage. That is a short visit. Patch it, float it, feather it out, match the texture, and a year from now you will not be able to find the spot.

Now change one thing at a time. The texture is a knockdown that somebody sprayed by hand fifteen years ago, so matching it means practicing on a scrap board until it reads right. That part is a job of its own. Or the paint has faded unevenly and a spot repair is always going to show, so the honest fix is cutting in and rolling the whole wall. Or whatever that shelf was anchored into has moved, and there is a reason it came off that no amount of patching is going to solve.

None of that is exotic. It is ordinary. But the job I would quote off your description and the job actually sitting on your wall can be two different jobs, and you are the one who ends up absorbing the difference.

What you get instead

I come and look at it. Then you get the scope and the price in writing before anything starts. Getting one does not commit you to a thing. What is written down is what I am going to do and what it costs, so we never have the conversation at the end about what was and was not included. That conversation is where people get hurt.

A good bit of the smaller work I can price off photographs and save us both a trip. There is a whole post on which photos actually help.

The three things that genuinely change a number

• Access. A ceiling repair you can reach off a step ladder and the same repair over a stairwell are not the same job. One of them needs staging built before a single tool comes out of the van.
• What is behind it. Open a wall and sometimes it tells you why the problem happened in the first place. Good thing to find. Bad thing to find late. If I hit something I did not expect, you get a phone call while I am standing there, not a bigger invoice at the end.
• What you choose. Materials and finishes run a long way apart, and that is your call to make, not mine to make for you. I will tell you where spending more actually buys you something and where it is just spending more.

What should make you suspicious of anyone's quote

• A number with no scope attached to it. If it does not say what is being done, you cannot compare it to anything and nobody can be held to it.
• Money asked for up front, before any material has been ordered for your job.
• Pressure to decide today. A price that is only good if you say yes right now is not a price, it is a lever.
• A quote that lands way under everybody else's. Something got left out of it. You will meet that something later, and it will not be cheaper then.

Related: Home Maintenance & Repairs

I get asked for home maintenance & repairs most often in Leander, Liberty Hill, Cedar Park, Georgetown.

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