Toby Newell
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- Messages
- 1,635
- Location
- Surrey
I don’t disagree Mr Newell, I’m never averse to paying a fair rate for skills and experience and obviously niche skills are harder to find and will command a higher price.
I expect to pay £250-£350 a day for an experienced stonemason or a brickie, likewise to your quoted rate for plumbers - happy to pay the hefty hourly rate if they turn up when they say they will, work hard and bash out the job in a few hours.
The “specialists” I was complaining about are generally those who put “heritage” or “conservation” in their title and think that allows them to charge 3 or 4 times that for a job that is rarely better than any “normal” trades, as per my lime plasterer example. Likewise if I’m paying a stone specialist to restore an ashlar wall and a significant sum, I don’t expect to see a spotty 17 year old to be dropped off on his own in the morning with a DOFF machine he doesn’t even know how to operate.
I do also suspect I am in the category 1 you mention, a few years ago I had a stone mason round to quote. After I had specified the job and methods required he asked me if I was a stone mason, didn’t believe me when I said no, and ultimately refused to quote.
I’ve also noticed that when I am working from home and answer the door in work attire, the prices tend to be higher compared to if I am sloping around in garden clothes and make the effort to hide my accent a bit
I know I am unusual in supplying written scopes of works for anything larger than a routine job but having worked on large construction projects in a professional capacity and seen the car crashes that can happen without them, it’s not a habit I’m likely to break any time soon
You will certainly put off most trades providing a written spec, that is nuts! I have worked for OCD people, proper, medical OCD. But if you tell the trades too much they will walk. I am better than most, I enjoy questions and explaining as you well now, but lol. With me (but I am very rare) if I liked you and the job I would kindly go through the spec and ammend it with you, if you were agreeable I would still quote. I have had to intervene on jobs when I see an overly anal client scaring a trade away
BTW those clients are normally lovely and very appreciative but sometimes I have to stop mid job and say, 'ask as many questions as you like, stand over me, but I DO actually know what I am doing, thank you.You are also totally correct, I repeat, building trade, full of sharks, restoration trade, even more full of sharks! Yes, their are tons, the majority I would say, by a large margin, maybe 70 to 80%+ of guys who have no real experience or expertise but who charge more because they say they have.
I charge £480 a day and will be retiring soon as it's not a living wage. My overheads are £100 a day and no, stop calculating, its not PAYE, I get no holiday pay, no sick pay, no pay at Xmas or bank holidays, I get last minute cancellations and rearrangements, my superannuation for the last 2 years was 0% I wanted to go on strike but management refused... my storage now costs £4,800 a year just to store my tools and now another £1500 for ULEZ to retrieve them.
People who do not pay for genuine experts will see them die out and then all that will be left is the chancers...