Quoting Projects
The custom furniture business is just plain fun. I get to make a living by doing one of my favorite things, designing and building furniture. Each project is unique, even in a small ways, from the ones that I have built before. A wide range of mental and technical skills have to be developed to tackle nearly infinite issues, and for the most part I love every minute of it. I love the thrill of closing a sale, the challenge of working with a customer’s needs and wants to design that perfect piece of furniture; I love the sense of accomplishment I feel when a pile of rough lumber is turned into a beautiful and functional object, and I love the look of amazement on a customers face when they see that the final product is better than they had imagined. Of course this line of work has its areas that I don’t “love” (like the entire sanding stage) but you find things to enjoy about them nonetheless.
I’m ambivalent about quoting projects. Sometimes it goes smoothly and I don’t mind it and sometimes I almost hate it. The wide variation in custom furniture that I love so much also means that there is no simple way to quote a job. Each job is unique. Materials, construction techniques, finishing styles, size, and scope all vary drastically from one project to another requiring each job to be broken down into smaller steps, each step analyzed, and a quote developed that takes every factor into account. None of this is quick or easy and mistakes can hurt big time.
All projects are quoted using time plus material multiplied by a markup factor. The material part is the easier of the two parts. I simply take the design of the project, break it down into its parts, and estimate how much material will be needed. This includes all dimensional lumber and plywoods, as well as all paints, stains, lacquers, hinges, knobs, handles, drawer slides, etc…but since this is concrete it’s not too difficult. The hardest part of the quote is analyzing the labor requirements. I don’t yet have decades of practice to base my estimates on so I can’t just look at a project and “know” what it will take. The more experience I gain, the more I become able to rely less on meticulous labor calculations and more on instinct.
Built-in entertainment centers are a bit easier than other furniture because I have been able to develop an open box and closed box cubic foot price. Material is still estimated the same way as with any job, but the labor, rather than being a sum of all the parts, is just a sum of the cubic feet. This method has served me well so far and has taken much of the stress off of the quoting process for those types of projects. But that still leaves me with all the complexities of the free standing furniture pieces and I have to tackle them the hard way. Initially it was a matter of estimate the best I could, track the amount of time spent, and analyze at the end of the job. During some of these early projects I was working for free about 2/3 of the way through. And of course, that’s a little problematic when bills are coming due so I’ve been learning quickly not to underestimate construction times.
So far this is all I know to do. Estimate to the best of my ability, build the project the best I can, and analyze at the end. So far I haven’t figured out a foolproof plan but I’ll let you know if I do. For now use your screwups along the way to learn and never repeat a mistake.