How to do Retaining Wall Bids, Estimates and Proposals

okay it's time to build a retaining wall what you're going to see behind me is a wall that we built a few years ago for a customer in a site in Minneapolis we use the versalock standard units on this course the customer did their own secondary retaining wall um they use a different block I wouldn't recommend doing that but uh they did this after the fact and out of our control and when you look at this garage you can see where we actually had to dig back the soil to sneak a wall in behind this garage to keep the pressure off from the garage from the yard today I'm going to teach you how to bid doing a job like that because the customer right next door wants the exact same thing done so what we're going to do is going to break this proposal down into removals excav a and then retaining wall installation and a couple of the details that we need to take into consideration is the joint space from one wall to the next now we're going to be using the same Block in this very specific case but we're going to have to stitch this wall together and you've seen my maybe you've seen my other video where I talk about retaining wall installation but on this project what we're going to be doing is we're going to go from the base and then we're going to remove this wall up at an angle so that this is removed and then when we build this new wall We join them together and eliminate this seam so how do we go go ahead and start calculating this thing down well the first thing we're going to look at is the removals now in this case there is no magic mystery formula that's going to solve this problem for you so you have to look at this and you're going to use a time and material basis it's going to be a lump sum you're going to have to be careful you're going to have to base It Off from experience on this very particular project our removal cost is going to run about $2,000 to remove this retaining wall to remove these steps and to get this dug back far enough that we can get our drainage material and our um base course in then we're going to also measure the retaining wall and I'm going to take you through the measuring process right now because we're going to break the wall down into its simplest components and that's on a per square foot basis and I'm going to cover with you back in the office when we put all these numbers together why we want to know exactly how many square feet we've got in this wall and how we're going to format our proposals to take that into consideration another component of this project is excavation I want you to look at this this this garage wall right here is actually acting as a retaining wall and it might be a little difficult to see from the video but this garage wall is in a state of failure you've already have a crack here that they've tried to repair with plaster which is nothing more than an aesthetic fix at that point structurally that that patch does absolutely nothing the only way to save this this garage wall is to take the pressure off to take the pressure off I have to go up and dig the soil off from the garage wall so all of this dirt that you see here it has to be excavated off and then I have to build the retaining wall about 3 4T off from this garage wall and then tie it in on the end okay to dig this out is a separate component that's the excavation number and it's not a very big excavation job but it's not an easy one it's a matter of getting a mini excavator up here so we what we'll be doing is we'll be removing that retaining wall and not building a new wall but building a ramp up into this backyard and then we come through the backyard and we use a miniature excavator and we carefully pull the soil off you got to be real cautious how you do this because you got to realize every time you dig down you're putting pressure on a failed garage wall so you do little scoops and you scoop backwards instead of going back what you do is you kind of gently scrape away to pull pressure off and that's how you're going to solve that problem get this off and give you enough space to come in to build your retaining wall in this case that's why we're going to itemize just this component of it because it's going to be expensive and the customer needs to understand where that money is coming from where their money is actually going to and so when you itemize it you protect yourself you clarify it for the customer they have a better understanding and it's not that magic mystery lump sum number that I'm telling you guys to avoid you build profits into every component of the job so you don't have to fear any one section of the job um next is measuring so let me get the measuring tools out and take you through the simple way that we measure these retaining walls and how we go about getting those numbers so we can put it into uh the proposal back at the office all right so let's get into the measuring want to show you how easy it is I'm just going to use just a standard tape measure I have a 50 and 100t tape behind you that sometimes I use as well but in this case we're just going to use a standard tape measure one of the things that I want to focus on in this this example is to make sure that you understand you've got to bury a course now this is a pretty flat grade in this case this is just a parking lot so we're going to bury one course we're going to go 6 in deep now you can't by by any means show that to the customer after the fact so the customer needs to understand beforehand that your measurements includes all embedment so I literally just measure the length of the retaining wall it's 25 it's 25 ft from the end of the wall to the return on the step and we know they're going to put new steps in we're going to bust these steps out we know they got a pour new steps so we've got to measure the returns as well but we've got 25 linear feet and the average Wall height here's something I important that I want to show you this wall actually is not perfectly the same height all the way through it's taller here and shorter there the easiest way to measure this retaining wall is dead center that's going to give you an average from the tallest point to the shortest point for your quantity now remember we're going to charge the customer on a price per square foot we're going to use a spreadsheet the same formula that we use with a PA patio we're going to get a spreadsheet from the supplier we're going to have every block accounted for including the cuts including all the blocks you got to throw away that you got to remove small portions that you can't go back after the job and measure we're going to use the spread sheet okay but beforehand this is a proposal this is our initial offer to the customer we've got to get that quantity figured out to do that we're going to go dead center of this wall we know it's 25 ft dead center is here this wall is 4.5 ft tall of exposed wall and I always add one foot now we know we're going to add six inches for sure one foot is always a better footing you can always back a little bit out but so it's going to be 25 by 5.5 that's going to give me my complete square footage for the face of this wall now we're going to measure the returns next and then we're going to go in I'm going to show you how we're going to measure the retaining wall that is immeasurable what I mean is there's no retaining wall there now I can't get a tape up in there I'm going to show you how we do that it's easy so here we are looking at this return right here and this is what I call the return it this the wall that runs up alongside the steps we measure the return the same way we measure the average height of the wall we just go what's the length of the return in this case it's six feet we go the halfway point which is 3 foot we measure the height of the wall at that point which is 2T we're going to add one foot for embedment this return is going to be 18 square ft so it's 6 * 3 okay we got one two returns so we know we've got 18 and 18 we got 36 square feet just in these returns don't forget to measure those they're going to be a little bit more of a pain in the butt to install so make sure your quantities are strong on these things because the worst thing you can do is put a lot of Labor and time in it and then short your yourself on materials as well so you want to protect yourself make sure you get a good strong estimate on something like this that's the way I do all my returns average return is usually between 15 and 20 square feet I don't even measure them anymore but for this video I wanted to show you how we come up with those I may actually technically put this proposal in at a little above 18 square feet because it is such a steep run narrow opening doesn't give my installers much room to work next let's go and this failed garage wall I'll show you how we're going to measure that so we're inside this garage right now and one of the things I want to point out to you is we are actually building the retaining wall on the outside of this structure there really not feasible to measure it out there so what I'm going to Simply do is I'm going to take my tape measure I'm going to measure the length of this garage and then I'm going to measure the estimated height of the retaining wall outside now this garage is your your typical garage which is about 22 ft long but we got to we're going to compensate a little bit we always want our our um estimated numbers to be just a titch higher it's a safety factor for you and the customer this one's 22 ft long this garage wall is 4 feet 4 and 1/2 ft pretty much the same as what we have over there we're going to go by 5T in this case so that's how we're going to come up with the quantity for this to make sure that when we do the install we know we've got the main wall measured we've got the two returns measured and then we've used this garage wall as our template for a retaining wall which gets installed outside of it and we have our excavation number that we're going to go back over and do the do the calculations for that in the office so this is how we start any retaining wall project is by field measurements all right it's time to go over some actual numbers on this project and teach you how to bid this retaining well for your own uh first off before we get started I want to apologize I'm a little Dusty I'm a little dirty if you watch my video day at work with genetic um you'll see in that video I had met with a customer and G gave him a proposal to regrade his yard for $2,000 well I started that job this morning at 8:00 and it's now a little bit after 12 12:30 and I got it all wrapped up so I figure it's now time to phase two to get this uh retaining wall bid so I can show you guys how to do this on your own now I want you to pause the video right here I want you to look at this job this is the actual bid sheet from 2012 it's right now 2015 I originally bid this job May 4th 2012 so look at the numbers that you see there on that sheet and what you're going to find is the job has grown okay I haven't done anything to the job but the homeowners had a couple years to chew on it and they finally figured out what they really wanted to do and they came back and said hey we want to add on and you've seen what we did we were removing the dirt Excavating behind the garage wall and so I'm going to go over I'm going to compare and contrast the two numbers now they said something that was key in this proposal they said they understood the rate of inflation would probably have increased some of the components of the job besides the fact now that's the key besides the fact that they had added on to the job anyway so I want you to look at 2015's proposal I want you to take a moment to pause this video this is the actual proposal that was turned into them and what you will see is it is line item per line item per line item per line item and we're going to go over that and this is the way you're going to format your proposals this is going to work for you it's going to Pro protect you okay the first line item on this thing is the actual retaining wall it's s now in this case we have approximately that's the key term approximately 298 square fet that means that I'm I'm I think there's 298 Square fet on the job and that's what I'm going to put in for that price per square foot now the original quote was $28 per square foot back in 2012 because of inflation we're now at $32 per square foot and you are going to be asking me well how did you come up with that number that's my market price okay for residential you will be dictated by your market price and nothing more commercial is a different Beast these numbers will not apply towards a commercial site you need to understand that and I will give you a video on Commercial sites literally commercial sites the smallest commercial site you'd ever want to even touch would probably be 6 7 800 square feet but you're going to get about half of the price per square foot I'm getting $32 a square foot because the market says I can get that my reputation says I can get that which means people know me they're calling me after three years original proposal modified proposal uh upto-date proposal and so that allows s me to make sure that my prices are the same and it it tells me automatically that 3 years ago they were good with $28 a s foot I'm not going to go backwards on it so um I want you to look at remove the wall now you've seen we had a wall to remove and that was the first portion of the wall I divided the wall into two sections um from the garage to behind the garage was one section and that was Excavating but everything in front of the garage was a different section and in this proposal I've actually line item the removal of that area at $1,760 okay and then right below that I have actually line item the excavation to haul away the soil behind the the garage wall so we have to what they want us to do is they want us to pull that soil off from the garage wall because it's caving in they want us to haul that away and get rid of it and create that Gap that you we' seen we showed it according on the next door neighbor site okay and to do that portion of the work I want to be very specific how I did this now excavate and haul away soil to create a four to six foot Gap okay haul out 46 tons or three loads of soil between the building and the retaining wall now I'm not creating a 10 foot Gap and I'm not hauling out 80 tons of soil I have very clearly said I'm going to haul out 46 tons or three loads and I'm going to create a 4 to six foot Gap now how do I come up with a 4 to six foot Gap well the it's a simple math the length of that wall was about 22 uh linear feet the height of that bank is 5 foot and we're going to create a 5 foot cut between the two so it's 22 * 5 * 5 then you divide that that gives you cubic Fe feet then you divide that by 27 to convert to cubic yards okay and that's compacted cubic yards then you multiply by 1.25 to go from compacted cubic yards to expanded cubic yards because it automatically fluffs up as soon as you dig it out the dirt fluffs up and becomes bigger okay and then I don't haul in cubic yards I haul in cubic tons so then we're going to multiply by another factor of 13536 or maybe even 1.5 somewhere in that neck of the woods depends on the type of soil to go from cubic yards fluffed cubic yards to metric tons okay seems like a lot of math boom I'm going to try to put it in as I'm talking about it right over on the side of me here so that you have it you have a greater understanding the key component to that is I have clearly identified for $44,000 what work I'm going to do on this very specific line item okay I'm safe if anything goes wrong it's not on my back it's that way I'm protected and I've outlined it before we start with the customer so they have an understanding of what we're going to be doing now as part of that program part of this job proposal we have to actually disassemble part of the neighbor's wall and we have to stitch it back together so the neighbor's Wall comes flush here's the wall we're removing here's the neighbor's wall that we had built I've got to peel this part back and then Stitch it into the existing wall so they all flow together that doesn't happen for nothing okay there's a lot of work that has to go into that and I'm line eming that I'm line eming that for $725 is what I'm line eming that for it's going to take me about a day to pull it apart and probably another day or so half a day to reassemble it and put it all together it's not a huge amount of work on its own but it's just part of the overall scope of work and something that's easy to overlook so I want to make sure that you guys are on the same page as me now because in the original proposal I had options in here optional removing stairs reassembling fence saving the fence exporting extra fill soil and the customer was okay with this format I'm kind of sticking with that for the rest of this one okay and so I have the same thing remove the stairs and dispose now this case is $490 in the original proposal from 2012 it was $390 so the extra $100 inflation everything costs me more now it's been three years so that's how I justify it hand disassemble fence and save it is a line item is $350 behind that retaining wall was a fence I really hope they don't want me to hand disassemble and save that thing because it's not going to look any better and I'll probably end up talking the customer out of it but in case they're adamant about it I'm protected I have $350 in there and then here's an important one here's an important line item there the last line item is export extra fill soil at $325 okay make sure you go back and pause this video in the beginning and make sure you get a good understanding that last line item protects me if our math is off if the calculation of the soil that we're going to remove between the garage and the um the bank and the retaining well that we're going to build doesn't quite work out and I end up hauling one more extra load out I'm protected here's what I'm going to get I'm going to get $325 for that extra load of dirt it says so right in the contract right on the very bottom okay now a lot of you asking well how much is the overall job value here well look at it there it is it's right there that's what this project is and in fact I want you to notice a few things not only did I line item everything that's in this job but then I go back and I repeat myself and say hey this proposal includes certain things and then I go in and say this proposal does not include I actually go through and exclude things a lot of them don't even apply towards this job but it's boilerplate boilerplate means it's on every single project that I do I cover myself because it's too too hard to try to think of every detail on every job so you create a generic list and you rubber stamp it onto every job you what else's rubber stamped that my proposals on every one of them excuse me for bumping you see this box right here see this box boom boom boom boom look at I even specifically outlined that box you know what that box is notice of prelink you have to do that in my state I don't know about your state but if I don't give them a prean notice if this gal and this guy decide they don't want to pay me I can't lean their house but because it's right on the original proposal and they will have to sign this give me $100 and send it back to me here's how my proposals look okay here's actually a few of our our here's our job list here's how we we we format it okay their $100 deposit gets stapled right to their check and this is how busy we stay because of how we operate there's no way I can get through a quarter of these jobs this year I'm already booking for next year because every proposal is the same guys and gals out there it's clear it's easy for the customer to understand I break it down light item per line item it's tougher for me to…