Can you just give me a ballpark price for various tasks at my property?

Short answer: yes… most of the time we can help guide you generally speaking on how best to use your budget to accomplish your priority list. However, if you are looking for someone to price out every single part of your project down to the individual parts of each line item, please consider calling someone else first. We are designers, dreamers, and artists more than accountants and office workers. We have an on staff CPA for the finances, but our estimators are not going to be able to give you a print out of every single line item on your project. We just meet too many people and have too many opportunities to get hung up crunching numbers and getting hyper focused on the cost of work before we even know if the potential Client is going to hire us or not. Our passion is delivering a beautiful result you can be proud of, and we are very good at giving “ball park” estimates. Just remember though, a list of written line items with different prices next to them is not a “ball park” estimate. That is something that takes a lot of time to produce. And if if you require this for an insurance claim, or to appease an HOA, board of directors, spouse, business partner, general contractor, real estate agent, or the reincarnated Elvis Presley himself, just know it’s not our favorite thing to do, and we aren’t going to do it for free. But if it seems you are serious about doing the work, and really just need that to get approved funding, we can talk about it. But depending on our schedule, how busy we are, and what kind of a mood we are in, producing the write up you are looking for just has to be considered on a case by case basis, and usually if it’s lots of detail you want we are going to need to be compensated at least a little bit to make time for procuring it for you. There’s a much better way though, instead of getting hung up on whether or not we are going to charge you for a breakdown of project costs before we even start doing any work, think of it this way. Hire us for the feeling you get when you first meet us. Allow us to walk you down the path of going through our design process, and once all of the project specifics have been finalized and defined clearly on a design plan, we’ll gladly help you know what to expect for future project costs. We’ve helped a number of good repeat clients over the years with a line item cost calculation (during the design process) and it’s been a good exercise to help those Clients understand more precisely what individual items are going to cost… so in that regard, we are not completely against it… but this is something we charge for… we don’t just do it for free as part of a “free estimate” because it takes a lot of time and our time is very valuable. And we have found that most people looking for a cost comparison are also looking for a low price… and so, knowing we will likely not be the lowest price, we just come out and say it. So, to be clear, the free estimate is the “ballpark” we will quote verbally during our initial consultation at the property (or over the phone for smaller projects). We commence work together with a written agreement that reiterates what we intend to do within the range of your desired budget, or alternatively within the ball park estimate number we verbally quoted previously, and then we refine the scope of work and/or the budget as necessary during the design phase of work according to Client preferences and priorities for the project that come about during the collaboration.