Masonry, Concrete, Hardscape design

Q. What advice do you have for a customer looking to hire a provider like you?

A. Any one looking to hire a hardscape and masonry contractor to bring a project to reality should be fully confident in the skills of the installer and the contractor. In the business of building for residential work a vast skill set is needed from the person doing the actual work. For example, When I build a driveway, I do demolition and disposal, grading and compacting, drainage and plumbing, irrigation and low voltage moving, all before I actually get to install the new driveway, which require wood forming, concrete design, concrete finishing and that’s if the driveway is simple concrete. Driveways I build often have stone or brick or pebble finishes all requiring a skill-set often learned only from experience.

Q. If you were a customer, what do you wish you knew about your trade? Any inside secrets to share?

A. A good landscape designer can save you a great deal of money, time, and stress.
Often a project may be to small and to simple to need a designer. But sometimes when a project involves multiple elements and is extensive in scope, a plan needs to be drawn to layout exactly how these elements should look and interact with each other. Once a plan is drawn and all the elements are exactly as the client wants them to be, then the plan can be shown to multiple contractors for bids. This is where money is saved. Each contractor now knows exactly what is needed to finish the job according to the plan. Time is saved because the client no longer needs to explain the individual elements of the project because the plan shows what needs to be done, ex. where the walkways start and where the walls end etc. it’s all on the plan. The stress is relieved because the client can now spend time getting to know the contractor and not showing where things are going to go. The client should pay attention to how the contractor approaches the project. Does he take the plan, role it up and say “I’ll have an estimate for you soon.” Or does he take the time to look it over and have thoughtful questions for you and the designer, does he walk through the plan to check and see if there are any potential problems, that only a person with his expertise would be able to see, does he have questions and impute that is constructive and thoughtful. If the meeting with the contractor is satisfactory you now have more information on which contractor you should hire than just the bid price. Keep in mind that when a person comes to work on your home there is a need to be comfortable with the person you hired and having more opportunity to let him or her show you what they know is created when having a plan and that often requires a landscape designer.

Q. What questions do customers most commonly ask you? What's your answer?

A. The most common question is the one every client eventually has to ask. "How much?" my answer is always the same, the "correct price". The correct price is a not expensive and it is not cheap it is an accurate reflection of the true and honest price of any given project.
The correct price is comprised of four elements. First, cost of materials and construction costs like equipment rentals etc. Second, cost of labor for the construction, Third, overhead of the contractors business, and fourth, profit. The first and second are self-explanatory. Overhead and Proit need explaining. As the client it is advisable to have a mindset that the contractor you hire should make a profit and recover his overhead. The Overhead is the cost of maintaining a business that all clients share. For example, my cell phone bill and the phone, office expenses, fuel for the work truck, insurance for the work truck, the truck itself and every single tool I own, will need to be replaced one day. The profit is the money that the business generates so that the business can be a healthy and competitive enterprise. As a contractor, I don’t know a single other contractor who does not recover his overhead and make a profit and stay in business. Some contractors go about it in the wrong way, by under biding and skimping and cutting corners. These contractors produce second-rate work that is neither timely delivered nor substantially workmanlike in completion or looks awful and this is how they make their overhead and profit. The correct way is to be transparent about overhead and profit. I have learned to make an estimate for a client on a project that is transparent; I make a cost breakdown and include it in the project estimate. It has the cost of all the major building materials, cost of rental equipment and other costs of construction, the cost of labor and how many days or hours and men will be employed and the overhead which is a per day number, about $65 dollars a day, and the profit, which is %10 - %25 of the total depending on the difficulty of the project and degree of competition of my competitors. This way the client knows where the money is going and what the reasons are for how much the project costs, and this is the correct price. Another reason for profit is that as a contractor I am not perfect. I can make a mistake about any number of factors, from under estimating the cost of materials or man hours to complete the project or my crew can break a water main that cost the project time and money to fix. The things that can go wrong are numerous and the profit creates a cushion for the contractor. Without the cushion the project demands that corners be cut, because all contractors make a profit to stay in business and as an honest contractor I have to be honest about the correct price.

Q. Do you do any sort of continuing education to stay up on the latest developments in your field?

A. As a contractor there are always new materials and or techniques to learn. Most are garbage. As a Mason the best materials and techniques have already been perfected. Everything else needs to be scrutinized and practiced. To do this I attend conventions in my own field but also in related fields like landscaping, I attend work shops like the one I took on Concrete staining materials and Instillation techniques. I take courses and become proficient in new fields like Landscape design and Interlocking Concrete Pavement Materials. I also try new things out on my own home before I attempt to install them for a client.