[peteg]

I am putting a bid on a 50x70 ft flagstone patio in concrete. Driveway is up hill for about 30ft that makes it harder to unload stone and other material.
At $30.00 sqft that 63000. We are also bidding on 2 retaining walls, steps
and a fountain. In this area 25-30.00 sqft is normal. We haven't done a patio this large before so I open to any suggestions on how people bid.

[Stonehenge]

Is the slab already poured?

Can you drive up the driveway to unload the materials?

[jshilan]

I hope your construction techniques are better than your math.

50x70=3500
3500x30=105,000

105,000-63000= 42000 you just gave away

Calculator - $10

[peteg]

calculater? whats that? opps is right ,good thing I aways doulble check everything.
Anyway, we will have unload material on street and move with fork lift.

[peteg]

slab not poured or ready.

[Lumas976]

What we would normally do is used a skid-steer with forks to move it off the trucks and down the hill. Just don't forget to include the price of lawn repair. A forklift might be nice for unloading the pallets as you need a pretty large skid to get those 5k+ lb pallets off the trucks.- New Holland 190 will do it.... just dont try and slide the pallet off if its too heavy or you may drop foreward and hit the dirt (Yes, i may have done this before....5800 lbs is a little much for the skid at 10 feet in the air)

Ya.. Telling you stuff you probably already know but i'v known plenty of contractors who forget the cost and equipment needed to just move the materials.

[martinjohn]

sounds cheap to me

[PaverStone]

For one you should never bid strictly by sq. ft. You need to figure your profit first, material, then labor. After that you can then cross reference it with the sq. ft. to see where you are.

[PSUscaper]

Sounds like a job not worth taking at this point in the game. Then again, a lot of contractors like to work for free, just like they like bidding jobs by the sq ft, so maybe it would be a good one. I like when guys do jobs like this and then say later on that it was a 'learning experience'.

And look that up in a dictionary....'learning experience' - the act, or action of losing a lot of money while performing, or attempting to perform, a job or task, with little or no knowledge of what one is doing.

[familyguy]

puscaper- you have absolutely no tact

[martinjohn]

Bidding or estimating by the sqft is a great way to lose money. Figure wisely like by material, labor, overhead, equipment first then add profit is you think you can get more.

[peteg]

your help I dont need,thanks

[4seasons]

you might think he's rude, but I think he's right on the money.
I can't stand seeing jobs go to guys who have no clue how to bid
the job.
They say : I've done the work before, I just don't know how to
bid it.
act like its a smaller job or jobs by breaking it all down then put it together, waalaa you have your bid!

[Fine Edge]

Hold on for a second>>>>>>.
Bidding by the sq. ft. CAN be done, if you have enough experience in different types of installation circumstances.
I can usually tell about what a project is going to cost when I look at the terrain, etc... because I've watched my project costs on all types of jobs.
So, when I have a 1200 sq. ft. patio with easy access, minimal grading, etc... , I know I can do it for x amount per sq. ft. and make my profit. It's because I've watched my costs over the years and know I can make a profit for various scenarios.
I still take into account all materials, labor, overhead, etc.. before each client gets the final price but for some simpler walls and patios where I know all of the associated variables, I can pretty much pinpoint my final price based on square footages.
It's because I've estimated many jobs both ways and have tweaked my numbers over the years so that both ways are pretty much the same.

On larger projects with many different installations, it gets a little more complicated but I won't go into that here.

So, to say that everyone who prices a job by the sq. ft, price is going to lose money, well, that's pretty much ignorant.

Hopefully for a patio and project that large, you will take into account all the extra variables that will come into play and make your quote not just on sq. ft. pricing.

[familyguy]

ideally, in my opinion, the ft2 pricing should be used as a way to check wether or not your estimnate of time, materials, and other factors seems accurate.

if your experience shows that you have an average of $30 per ft2 as your profitable pricing rate, a difficult job might come out as $34 p ft2 after you have calcualted your labor, materials, and other factors.

ultimately, we are all estimating jobs using our experience and our own costs as a way of making the best educated guess we can. when we are first getting into offering a new service, we don't have enough experience to make that "educated guess", so often we will use a tool to come up with some way of making a halfway intelligent guess as opposed to an educated guess. The tool = the ft2price. While not ideal, it has it's place, like checking your work at the end of a bid or a way to give a halfway decent bid on a service you are not that familiar with bidding.

On a different note, the purpose of this site is to ask questions OR provide the best answers possible to an asked question.

NOT to ridicule, be rude and sarcastic, or demean somebody for not knowing everything. I would hate to ask a question and be made fun of by someone who might know a lot about that particular topic. I might be tempted to wait until they asked a question that I knew a great deal about and humiliate them out of spite....that would make me an asshole too.