How to Bid Excavating and Grading

we're going to build a parking lot today what I want you to see so we're going to build an extension sorry off from this parking lot this road based material when it gets wet it gets slick this lumber yard runs a lot of forkless I'm going to teach you how to build a road and more importantly than that how to estimate it this is a pretty good siiz project that can bite you in the butt if you don't do it right but it's not complicated it's easy to bid these things so why are we here the first thing that I want to show you is they have two different kinds of materials in this parking lot they got this rock which is awesome I wish the entire parking lot was like that if it was they wouldn't need me right but then they got the reason they need me which is this silt this when it gets wet gets slick so how do we go ahead and measure building an area and estim how do we how do we do an estimate for a job like this let's walk you through it step by step because there is a process hopefully my car isn't in the way of that forklift um this is what we have you see this this muck this slick stuff is my car okay car is okay that slick stuff those forklifts that you see in the background they can't operate on this stuff so what we got to do in this situation is we got to come in here grade off this entire parking lot that's one step kiss keep it simple that's one step that's the first step so we're going to break this Pro this proposal down this estimate down step by step by step so we understand it we're going to put that all in the same steps to the customer so they understand it when they're confident in The Proposal when they're confident in the contract you're going to get more work okay so we're going to look at this whole area and we're going to guesstimate I don't know what other scientific word to use how long it's going to take to grade this out that comes through experience that comes through doing smaller jobs and then working your way up to a bigger project like this so we're going to guesstimate how many hours we're going to put into this thing and then we're going to qualify those hours on the proposal so on the proposal we're going to say we're going to grade out the existing subgrade for 15 hours at $105 an hour something like that that way if it takes 16 we can charge them an extra hour if we don't take 15 well then we you know we may want to uh take their proposal and knock it down a little bit and save them some money second step is we're going to lay roadbase fabric down because this is a parking lot you've seen me do the road based fabric on patios this is where it actually applies this is how we prep these Lots we don't do a soil correction when we come into these things we just just lay the fabric down we got to determine the area I measured the area 210 linear feet this way 105 linear feet across so we know how many square feet we have which converts to square yards which is how we buy Road based material we lay that down and then we bring in class five and I'm going to go over the formula with with you on that back at the office all right before we get too crazy deep into the numbers I'm going to show you the actual proposal that I've turned into this company at this point when I want you to do is pause the video and look carefully over these numbers this is the actual proposal that they receive and you can see how I've broken it down into four separate categories okay and what that does is that gives me confidence in my numbers but it also clarifies the proposal to the uh to the customer and it helps them wrap their head around it you want to avoid that lumps some magic mystery number because it doesn't really give the customer any confidence in what you're doing and what they're spending tens of thousands of dollars on so let's actually break down how we do the calculations now on the first step of this proposal we have grade the subbase and prep for new base material that's strictly labor that's strictly going into that tannish rock clayy subsoil and creating a crown and I want to explain to you what a crown on a parking lot is the park parking lot currently looks more like this kind of flat nothing what we want to do is we want to create a peak in the middle and then we want the parking lot to gently roll to both sides so when water comes down it will run away from the parking lot as quickly as possible your road almost every road you drive on will have a crown on it and we want to create that in the parking lots we want to get the water to run away we don't want Ming or ponding this is how you do it this this site that you just seen was a perfect example of an easy one to create the crown on but that starts with the subbase so that starts with creating that Perfect Pitch going down in way to both sides the next step on this case because we're not doing a soil correction because we don't have perfect conditions to just lay class 5 down we were going to be putting down filters fabric remember we talked about that and we needed to know how many linear feet or actually technically how many square feet a Filter Fabric remember those numbers we went over it was 210 22,50 Square ft that is the number we need for the Filter Fabric then we've got a price all Filter Fabric we got to make a phone call and say hey I need 22,50 ft of Filter Fabric how much is that going to cost me in this case it was $1.75 was it a oh no it was $175 per roll we needed 10 rolls I apologize um and so we knew we had $1,750 just in Filter Fabric now you've got to get those rolls to the site then you've got to lay those rolls out you've probably got a good portion of a day spent just getting that right then you're going to probably staple the joints on those rolls so where one piece of fabric goes the next piece of fabric lays over the top of it like this you're going to put a staple right there to make sure that it doesn't split and separate and it doesn't pop up through this through the base material okay so in this estimate what I have is I have Place Filter Fabric over the subbase 10 rolls now watch this 10 rolls at $370 now why do I tell them how many rolls I'm putting in place well because what if I run short I don't want to be if I was just a lump somewhere it say Place Filter Fabric over subbase I'm on the hook but now I'm off the hook my butt is safe because of this number because I put 10 rolls in place now if I need 11 rolls I just go hey I need another roll it's going to be an extra $370 that covers my labor that covers delivery fee that covers the material but what if I only need eight or nine rolls you just shut your mouth you just put the money in your pocket for the extra two rolls that you didn't need you know you're going to need you've done the math you know you're going to need about 10 rolls but for some reason you don't need quite that many perfect you're still going to charge them $3,700 so that's how you do a lump sum and you protect your own heiny here it gets a little more complicated now we've got to do the math for the class five we're going to be importing 561 tons of recycle class 5 now let's go over this math I'm going to put the formula up on the screen right about here I actually don't know if it'll show up there or not I'm sorry but here's the formula here's how you calculate that you take the length times the width then times the depth now in this case we're going to put 6 in of Class 5 so your formula would be I remember the numbers right 210 * 105 which is your length times width your depth is 6 in or half a foot so it' be 0.5 so 210 * 105 * .5 I got to quickly figure out what that comes out to 210 because I want to make sure that as I'm speaking I get the right numbers to * .5 so we have 11,025 square feet but now we want square yards now we want cubic yards I apologize too many numbers and I am Polish so I have a built-in excuse for everything I do so we're going to convert cubic feet to cubic yards by dividing that number which is 11,25 by 27 that is your conversion factor so now we know we have 4833 cubic yards of Class 5 going into this site to this parking lot that doesn't help you for nothing okay that is the start 48.3 three cubic yards isn't the answer okay I got my butt burned one of my estimators did a manard Superstore and he forgot to convert cubic yards to metric tons and I lost tens of thousands of dollars on that job because of that so don't have this mistake happen to you there's one more step guys and gals you take that 40833 and you multiply it by 13 I don't know five six s it doesn't make a difference that converts it to metric tons okay in this case uh I come up with 5 551 metric tons on my calculator here in The Proposal I have 561 so when I did the math earlier I probably multiplied it by 1.36 or 1.37 it doesn't matter but you almost have a third increase from a cubic yard to a cubic ton and you can see where 408 cubic yards if you purchased if you put that in and mistakenly went to the pit to buy that that would convert to 561 tons and that would be a huge deficit for you guys okay so now in this case let's calculate how much that material is going to cost us we know we got 561 tons hey one thing I want to be I want to show you too on this before I get ahead of it 561 tons if you pause this and look carefully you can see we're covered again we're not importing 562 tons we're not importing 600 tons we're not saying we are going to import class 5 and create a base for the parking lot we're not saying that what we are saying very clearly is we are importing 561 tons of recycled class 5 based material we are safe there is no fear in that number there's only a cushion for me to make money because if I come up and I can and if I'm able to uh class five that parking lot for 540 tons or 530 tons I'm still charging them for 561 tons that's my maximum amount and that charge is $785 so what we're going to do$ 7,854 divided by $561 we're charging $14 a ton for class 5 how we break that down is the material itself costs I think it's like $77.50 for the class five plus tax so probably a little over $8 per ton so let's just call it $8 per ton so $6 per ton is what it cost me to get it to the site now in this case I'm importing it with my own trucks so I'm putting that $6 a ton in my pocket for labor and fuel it's not really total profit but there is profit built into it for me now if you were hiring a trucking company to bring this in you might want to raise your price a little bit because you want to make money on every component of the job you don't want to make money just here and have nothing over here everything on this job you're C you're doing the the calculations you're making the phone calls you're coordinating this project you deserve to make money on every component of the job without feeling guilty you should feel good about it because you're providing a service you're doing something for the customer there's no doubt about it so make sure you build profit into just the purchasing and transporting of the class five last line grade and compact the class 5 Base material this is where it's all you this is where if you have a skid loader and compacting you can rent a plate Packer you can rent a packer but technically really don't need to do a whole lot of compaction when it's just 6 in of material just importing it and having the skid loader drive over it that's called compression compaction okay and what you can do is as you grade out that parking lot you have the dump trucks roll over what you've already created and then they dump and they're rolling over the base material here that you've already laid down every time they drive they're packing the heck out of it so if you don't have a packer I wouldn't worry too much about it here's a fun little story I was building the Menard Superstore in Maple Grove and a company called Koss Anderson had a douchebag supervisor I can't remember his name this guy was just a tool in every sense of the word and we were using compression compaction for the footings on the building and he came up and he was furious with me he's like you can't compact a building like that you can't get you can't get I think we had to have 95% standard Proctor density on that job site you can't do that and I just kind of stood there and I waited for him you know the steam to quit rising out of his ears and I said just test it just get it tested and let's see where we're at and what I was doing with compression compaction is I had an old dump truck I mean this thing probably I don't know how I got it out to the site and I mounded the dirt on this dump truck and all I did was drive that dump truck around the footings of the building over and over and over again and when we had that tested we reached almost 100 I think it was 107% % standard Proctor density we had to I think we had to make 95 or 97 we were way over on car compaction that's how effective compression compaction is you don't always need a vibratory Packer um sometimes you don't want one but I'm getting off hand so just the weight getting back to the point just the weight of the truck itself is going to pack it the weight of your skid loader as long as you're not using a track skid loader if you got a tired skid loader even a track skid load is going to compact it don't don't fool yourself you just got put it in thinner lifts um the $88,500 how many hours do I have now that is a lump sum I am taking a little bit of a risk there but I know my numbers pretty well so I'm not overly concerned 8500 divided by 105 which is what I want for a skid loader 80 hours of work there's not 80 hours of work in there but um you know I suppose we could work slower it doesn't make a difference CU I didn't break the hours down on this because I'm pretty conf confident in it uh let's see how much is this parking lot then so if we add up all of these numbers in this parking lot that we looked at together we have $3,900 for the subbase rating 7,854 to bring in class 5 and $8500 to actually have a ni skid loader just go out and grade that class 5 I got to set up laser too don't get me wrong $23,995 um I do have to create a crown I have to set up a laser I have to know what I'm doing I uh on the class five itself I have to create that pitch that we created with the subbase um and then I got to make sure that I don't have any any soft spots or loose spots so you know I guess 80 hours actually is a pretty realistic number because we are going to make sure that we don't rush through it and that we hit every component of this job so that when we walk away we walk away once okay we probably would never get a call back except saying thank you and now we're ready to lay the assphalt down at that point um so that's how you bid a parking lot it's as simple as that I hope this video has helped you please subscribe for updates um I love you guys' feedback you know that you hear it blah blah blah all the time you hear me telling you this stuff but it really is important I read everything you guys sent me unfortunately this is the height of the busy season I haven't been able to get back to everybody as much much as I'd like to but I'm still reading it and every chance I get I do respond to you guys I want to hear from you I hope this has helped get back to work don't you got something better than watch this catch you later