When a quote comes in lower than expected, I get over the initial elation pretty quickly as my wheels start asking “Why? What’s missing?”.
I can estimate with the best of them – I know how much a kitchen costs; how much we will spend on a bathroom; what flooring should run per square foot. I love to budget and I love when a client can honestly say at the end of a project that it has gone off without a single expense surprise. Shock is never the goal when a quote or final invoicing rolls in.
On a recent cottage kitchen reno with one of my longest standing and very favorite clients, a cabinetry quote came in below half where I expected it to be. In an effort to work locally, we sourced a small shop that came recommended by a fellow designer in the area. He was lovely – came well prepared to our first meeting with a variety of finishes he pulled from the short list of maybes I provided to him. The language and knowledge was there through out our first meeting so both the client and myself left feeling like we had met our guy.
And then the quote arrived to my inbox and left us both scratching our heads. What was it missing? Overhead for one. I calculated that overhead has to account for 20 per cent of a quote – space, staff, etc. OK. Material cost – we went with a plastic laminate (man-made, usually plastic, printed to look like wood grain with a particle board core) instead of a wood veneer (usually 1/8” real wood bonded to a less expensive, more stable surface, like particle board or MDF). Got it. That would account for some savings as well. Sigh. But where were the other gaps?
Design!! I usually do a hand drawing of a kitchen and then pass it off to the kitchen team to get into AutoCAD and work out the “guts” – shelf placement, drawer sizes, bells and whistles. These are particularly critical in a small kitchen where every nook and every cranny needs to be usable and functional. We received simple, one dimensional drawings, not even complete elevations or a plan. For a client who is highly visual, this doesn’t work. Not to mention the guts – no guts to be seen.
So the design gets punted back to me which I can do – but it isn’t WHAT I do. I am not a kitchen designer. I feel the level of detail involved in millwork to be a highly specialized area and my preference or comfort zone is to let the experts do WHAT the experts do.
Although we are both still sold on working local, we are concerned there is still something vital missing in this partnership. And for the spend, we both believe cutting corners to not be an option.
Will let you know where we land.