The renovation budget: Labor Data

Posted on September 24, 2007 - Filed Under Business |

Before continuing with the budget analysis, a few points need to be explained.

It was agreed on Day 1 that the labor would be charged on a "per hourly basis".  Not by the job.  As stated previously, I love the "pay by the job" concept.

I agreed to this billing method; I was hoping to be able to determine how many hours it would take to perform a specific task. For instance, if 25 hours were required to redo the drywall on the ceiling, then I wanted to be able to create a formula using the pieces of data.

From this data, a constructed formula for a new project show how much the total cost would be by knowing the square footage.  Similar to the hardwood floor calculation of $1.50 per square foot.

This exercise was to be repeated for the electrical, the plumbing, the travertine installation blah blah blah.

In the first few weeks, the invoices for the work were pretty much electrical and plumbing.  Each day was not broken down into "4.5 hours electrical, 3.5 hours plumbing".  For two people putting in an 80 hour work week and I knew that one person was doing electrical, one person was doing plumbing, The assumption: 40 hours on electrical and 40 hours on plumbing.

This worked fine up until other work started creeping into the work scope.  For instance, 80 hours would be charged to electrical, plumbing, kitchen demo.  The "divide by 2" methodology no longer applied.  And since the week had already passed, going back and asking how many hours were spent on each activity, each day, for each person would result in guesses or a lot of "I don’t know".

Even if the number of hours were known, the data would have been skewed.  More on this tomorrow.

If you liked that post, then try these...

Friggin Software! on August 1st, 2005
That useless software from Benjamin Moore didn't help me out at all!  They should have said on the software label "User needs to be Graphic Artist with Masters Degree in Adobe Photoshop".

The Bread Crumb Savings Plan on March 21st, 2008
No no no this has nothing to do with the Latte Factor.

Comments

Leave a Reply