Estimate Initial Costs Using Past Experience

4:15

11:18

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Construction Management and Estimating

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What happens here

Draw upon your past DIY project experiences or research similar completed projects to get a 'ballpark figure' for the current one. The contractor in the video recalls a previous retaining wall job involving 600 cubic yards of excavation and 87 tons of boulders costing $34,000. Use such data points to roughly estimate the scale and cost of your project's components. This quick estimate can immediately tell you if your vision aligns with typical costs or if it's wildly out of budget.

Goal: Formulate a rough cost estimate for the project based on comparable past work or research.

Tools and materials

Internet Access N/A — Researching average costs for materials and specialized services in your area
Spreadsheet Software Microsoft Excel — Organizing cost data from past projects or online research

What they say

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going on here. Okay, we've got a giant hill that comes right to the back of this guy's house. Now, I've done this job before. I've done this job many times. In fact, I have a video called How to Turn a Hill into a Flat Backyard. And that is it lays it all out um in that on that job. So now what I'm doing right now is instead of recalculating everything and reme-measuring everything, I'm going on past experience. And this is where you guys as you grow in your business, you're going to be able to do the exact same thing on this site. Let me back up so you guys can get a view of it in comparison. Now, we're going to compare and contrast that video where it says how to turn a hill into a flat backyard. We had 600 cubic yards of soil we removed. It looked almost identical to this. And then we ended up installing I don't remember how many square feet but I think it was 75 tons which 75 times 7 somewhere. Let me think about this for a second. You know on that job how to turn a hill into a flat backyard. I can reme I can't remember how many square feet we installed but I can remember how many tons of boulders. In this case it was about 87 tons of boulders. Now, if I'm going to do the math bass backwards, 87 tons at we get seven square foot per ton using a 2 to threeft boulder. Uh, so that's going to give us right around 600 to 625 square ft. Depends on how, you know, how many square feet per boulder we're getting. So, on that job, we hauled out 600 cubic yards of material and installed 600 square feet of wall. That job was $34,000 for that project. So, I know that's going to be our base. I really I know that's where we're going to be our base where we're going to start from, but then I'm going to start designing backwards on this one to uh find out what they need, where the house is going to be positioned as well because this this one is coming down and then the new one's going in. Um, and so we've got to get that figured out. Now, the homeowner is looking at me like, why is there a person outside my window? I've never I didn't knock on the door. I didn't know anybody was home. So, good enough. I better go talk to him, huh? Okay. It doesn't relate to the

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