Estimating Home Improvement Work

Estimating Home Improvement

Estimating home improvement costs requires specialized skills. You just can't price home improvement work the same way you'd price new construction. The proportion of labor expense is greater. There's far more risk in estimating costs as there are more varibles and unknowns. For example:

Hanging doors in new construction is a 1-2-3 affair. You know ahead of time exactly what's required. You can buy pre-hung doors and cut your labor costs significantly. If your framer did a good job, installing the door should only take an hour or two.

However, if you are removing an old door and installing a new as in home improvement work, chances are the homeowner will want to to install the doors into the existing jambs. The frame may have shifted or gotten out of square over the years requiring extra time to re-plane the new door to fit, and what happens if you discover termites or wood damage in the frame. The job can easily take half a day. With so many unknowns you can easily see why it's hard to estimate the cost of home improvement jobs.

A great book that may help you estimate home improvement work is the National Home Improvement Estimator. It includes the prices of just about every item you could ever run into in a home improvement job and gives the price of the item as well as a labor cost for installing the item. You can find more information at http://craftsman-book.com/products/index.php?main_page=cbc_product_book_info&cPath=22&products_id=174

Painting Rooms

Painting Rooms

Painting rooms can present some of the most boring work imaginable. As a professional house painter I've painted a lot of boring rooms. In this post I’ll try and share some tricks I learned to help you almost enjoy painting rooms.

1. Always, always, have the woman of the house decide on the color. No matter how it looks to us men, women notice the subtle variations of colors in other people’s home. Thay are often likely to be anxious to apply those colors to your own rooms. So empower them here — or pay the price and paint the room twice! If the color combination they chose appears really wacky, find one on those little card board sheets at the hardware store where you’ll be buying the paint. The little samples often show recommended color combinations. While these recommendations may not be entirely original original, they’re usually proven as esthetically-pleasing combinations. And are great tools for supporting an argument against an “unproven” color combination. Painting rooms is not fun but painting a room over is even less fun.

2. Prepare the surface and the floor of the room you're going to paint. If you are painting over semigloss paint (usually used on trim, kitchens, and bathrooms) wash the surface of the wall or trim with TSP. It eliminates grease as well as etching the surface of the old paint. It’s great for preparing kitchens — where grease has a tendency to stay in hard to reach corners.

If you feel like you’d like a little more stick power, a fine sandpaper can be used to help prepare the surface of the room. Sand paper is especially good on preparing doors for painting as they are large and flat. Once you’ve sanded or TSP’d your surfaces, you’ll need to take those hard-to-get areas where you just know that you’ll be making a mess. Be careful with the tape. It can make the job better — or a whole lot worse — especially if you are trying to create a smooth seam from one color to another. Sometimes a good sash brush is a whole lot better for making a sharp edge than taping and untaping a wall only to find that the paint bled under it.

3. Use a good drop cloth. Sometimes buying the cheapest, thinest plastic is not the best idea. You might actually be better off with newspapers. Cheap plastic is slippery and rips easily and if you’re not careful you’ll fall on your ass. Good cloth drop cloths can be used over and over and show that you care to buy the best because you're a professional. Cover the floor of the entire room, you don't want anyone to find dried paint somewhere on a nice rug after you've painted the room and left.

4. Buy the very best paint. Buying cheap paint usually means that you’ll be struggling to cover, and often painting the same room twice. The job is not much fun the first time, and usually gets worse as it ages. If you have bid the job in advance you don't want to be working for free. Best to paint the room with one coat by buying the best quality paint.

5. Tools: at least one good 4" brush (expect to spend around $10), as well as one really good sash brush (ditto). A weenie roller and tray for painting in small places and “in place” hanging doors. Buy a traditional roller with an extention pole for walls and ceilings. A ladder for ceiling sash work and hard to get corners of the room.

6. Making work pleasureable: Get a boom box portable style radio and either find music on the radio that you enjoy and can sing to, or play CD’s that you haven’t heard in a while. The importance of music is that it helps to relax and ease your mind during difficult and boring painting jobs like painting rooms. Avoid alcohol or coffee. One makes you sloppy and one makes you jittery. That’s not where you want to be while painting rooms. It's not professional and it's really not as fun as it may seem.

7. Get a helper to lay down the paint in front of you.You can finish up behind him and get what he misses. This pushes him to work faster and you to keep up with him while finishing up. It creates comradarie and you'll enjoy the work more when you have someone's mistakes to criticize and fix up. It also helps you paint rooms a lot faster than you would otherwise.

8. Prepare your work ahead of time, look over the room before you begin and see the completly painted room in your mind’s eye. Know that you can do it within the time frame you've bidded on. Anyone can paint. But not everyone can paint well and enjoy it!

If you want to check on painting prices for different types of paint and room sizes, check out the website http://www.get-a-quote.net for free prices. Select "painting" from the drop down menu and check the estimates for painting rooms.

Painting Doors -- Estimated Time

Painting Doors -- Estimated Time
Painting interior doors can be quick or slow, depending on the painter, the quality of paint, and the type of door to be painted. How can you accurately estimate the time? According to the manhours listed in the 2005 National Painting Cost Estimator painting an interior flush door should take 12 to 25 minutes per coat. This is probably a good rule of thumb. Remember though most doors seem to require two coats of paint to thoroughly cover. The tack coat on a door should also be counted as a "coat" as it requires the same amount of time.

The figure of 12 to 25 minutes is for painting all six sides of the door, doesn't include prep or masking time. This figure is for painting flush doors with a brush and roller. For spraying doors, the time goes down to around 5 minutes per door. That time doesn't include the time of cleaning out the sprayer or eliminating clogs that plug the spray head. French doors it should take from 15 to 28 minutes per coat to paint by roller or brush. Louvered doors should take from 22 to 30 minutes per coat. No estimate is perfect, and everyone works at a different level of speed. These figures are supposedly actual estimates from painters who paint doors for a living and should give you some kind of a estimated time baseline as to what you can expect painting doors to actually take.

Construction Costbooks -- Why Use Them?

Why use construction costbooks?

After all, the most accurate construction prices will be based on the manhours our own crews or subs used in the past. If we keep these construction costs we should be able to make accurate estimates of future costs -- provided that material prices haven't increased significantly and that crews productivity is the same.

But if you bid on a job that you've never done before then it becomes trickier. Instead of pulling figures from your head on what you think it might take, take a look at a few figures from a published construction costbook. Usually they breakout material costs, labor costs, and a total installed cost. See how they compare on jobs you have already done before before. If the prices are on the high side you can pretty much guess that the jobs you have no comparison for will be on the high side also.

You can find construction costbooks at most major bookstores such as Barnes & Noble. There are many types of constuction costbooks -- some for general construction, some for remodeling. Publishers include Saylor, Means, Craftsman and BNI. Usually, these books are published yearly. You can view the contents of the Saylor costbooks online at http://www.saylor.com The craftsman costbooks can be viewed at http://www.get-a-quote.net .

Site License -- What the heck is it?

There's been a lot of hoopala lately on site licenses. Many of us may not even know what the heck a site license is. It sounds like a driver's license for a web site.

Generally, a site license is a license to download software for multiple users at a discount. Most software manufacturers offer some form of a software license. Microsoft offers one, Adobe offers one and even Craftsman Book Company offers a site license.

The downside of a site license is that if your computer crashes you will have to look up your license to download the software again and it may be more troublesome and timestaking than just sticking in a CD-ROM with the program on it. But sometimes you can save plenty by purchasing a site license. It's worth looking into if you want to save money or if you have a group of people who want to use the same software program.

For more information check the website http://www.sitelicense.net It explains the site license in more detail.

Keeping Good Subcontractors

Most of the subs I've worked with are like brothers to me. I can count on them to be there when I need them and to get the job done for the price they've bid, and within the time frame they claimed it would take them to finish.

I can also count on their work to be top-notch. Nothing is worse than an electrician who skimps on material resulting in problems a month later. Or a foundation sub who hasn't figured out the access resulting in the concrete arriving late to the site and a cold joint forming in the foundation. Or a carpenter who fights the code inspector in the expansion requirements on roof sheathing.

Solving these types of construction problems always create headaches and take you away from creating or bidding on new jobs. Plus there's the added embarresment factor if a homeowner gets involved.

Keeping the best subcontractors means paying them on time, when the job is complete. And showing them how much you appreciate the work they've done. Take the time to point out where they used ingenuity to ocercome a problem and acknowledging their creativity. It'll go a long way towards the next job you have them bid on -- especially if they remember you as the one who noticed something special about their work.

Electrician's Exam

Electrician's Exam

If you've been installing electrical systems as an apprentice, helper, or unlicensed electrician, you may want to consider becoming a licensed electrician. More and more states are requiring licensing for electricians, and to become licensed you usually have to pass an electrician's exam. You can find the requirements for your state at http://www.contractors-license.org Just click on the state to find the licensing requirements and the electrician's exam requirements, where to apply for the exam, and what study materials you'll need.

There is also an excellent book with over 1000 typical questions from electrician's exams. It covers questions on electrical systems, electrical calculations, branch circuits and feeders, electric services, distribution equipment, overcurrent protection, measuring and testing, electric motors and controls, transformers and capacitors, electrical drawings and more. It also contains an interactive CD-ROM that gives electrician's the questions for the exam on the computer. They claim that the book is guaranteed to help you pass the electrician's exam or you get your money back. Not a bad deal for $39.50. You can find it at: http://craftsman-book.com/products/index.php?main_page=cbc_product_book_info&cPath=10&products_id=210

Studying for an electrician's exam is never fun, but with the help of a book and an interactive CD asking the questions, it can become less of a chore and help to prepare you to pass the actual exam.