How To Bid Finish Carpentry

How to bid finish carpentry is relatively easy. You do have to take a few things into consideration but there is plenty of room to make some good money. Being a finish carpenter I always bid my jobs by the job and with good reason. To start lets look at some of the basics on how to bid finish carpentry. I will be talking about labor only.

Basic Bidding

The size of the job is a big factor. If for example you are going to trim a whole house the first thing I look at is the square footage of the house. Thats the starting point because I charge so much per square foot. This price can range from $.8o to $1.00 per foot depending what is involved with the trim work in the house. Things that affect this price may include hollow core or solid core doors, how much work is involved with the windows, how complicated is the cabinetry in the kitchen or through out the house, or if we are installing cabinets at all and how much extra trim work is involved beyond the basics.

Extras Added To The Bid

There are a few items not included in the square footage bid and one of them is the Hand railing. Hand railings are a seperate price on top of the bid. A bare minimum price of a hand railing that needs to be built is $15 a foot. That is bare minimum if you have the whole job of trimming a house. If I go to a job just to build a railing I will charge up to $30 a foot depending on the railing. In other words I can't drive to a job 50 miles away to build a 3' railing for $15 a foot. It takes a lot of set up of tools and equipment also no matter how big or small the rail is.

Other Extras

Pocket doors are another extra. I used to just include these in the square footage bid until I ran into some higher end houses that had 10 or more pocket doors. They take a lot more time to install compared to swinging doors and involve more work. I will charge an extra $15 per door for these.

Big kitchens with a lot of cabinets, a lot of crown molding and extra work involved with the install are also an extra. In this instance I would up the square footage a little and then charge about $25 per cabinet and this would be where it requires a couple guys all day to install the kitchen. This is kind of a judgement call and a lot of times I rely on my experience to make this call because I can estimate the time fairly well.

How To Bid Finish Carpentry With Other Extras

Other extras may include wainscoating, extra built in cabinets, crown molding installed at the ceiling or anything that doesn't fit into the basic trim job of doors, windows,and baseboard. These to me are extras and I will look at them very closely and estimate the time it would take and tack on a little extra time for unseen problems and charge around $50 an hour all things considered. Again these prices on how to bid finish carpentry only include a whole house project of trim work.

Here's An Actual Example

This takes into consideration all materials are already on the job and the job is ready. This is a very competative bid in my area of the country.

  1. A split level home of about 1500 sqaure ft.
  2. Unfinished basement
  3. small or midsize kitchen, no extras and small crown on the cabinets
  4. 10 ft of railing
  5. window inserts-no trimming of windows just install the jamb that is already precased.

  1. $.85 x 1500' = $ 1275.00
  2. N/A
  3. included in sq. ft. bid
  4. $ 15 x 10' = $ 150.00
  5. included in sq. ft. bid

Total------------$ 1425.00

I get a lot of people asking how to bid finish carpentry. Most of the time my answer is the same, bid by the square foot. Then so much per foot for the railing.





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