New home owner who has never had to hire a contractor before. Want to have chain link fence replaced and want to have put in white vinyl fence to match connected town home.
It is just a 40 foot length I need replaced and will need to have one gate. As I get quotes, what kind of price should I expect to pay? What’s considered fair and what’s considered a rip off?
EDIT: Thanks for all the feedback! I think I’m not in the right tax bracket to hire people to do this, so probably going to try to do it myself.
My time to shine. I own a company that does fences, we specialize in custom vinyl. Obviously this varies by region, but I’ll price vinyl $95-130/ft, and $300 per gate. Depending on if I liked you, what I knew about the soil, travel time to your job, I’d probably come in around $5300, installed
It might sound insane, but my 4 man crew costs about $1100/day to keep on the road. 40’ in bad conditions is 2 days minimum, can easily spill into 3. My materials would be around $1500, so worst case I’m netting in $500 for 3 days of work, which is damn near unsustainable considering the amount of machinery I’ve got in play
What I am learning is that I am not in the correct tax bracket to pay for contractors unless messing up means the house burning down. So probably gonna be DIY this one.
The overhead running a legit business is unreal.
My general advice is don’t use post mix concrete, use regular stone mix and backfill immediately. The backfilled dirt will hold it in place and slow the cure, giving you hours to go back and tweak as you go. That rapid post makes no sense, there’s no urgency in the setting phase, that’s the opposite of what you want.
And remember, if you do a good job it can last 20+ years, so don’t be lazy and take a shortcut because it’s “good enough”. You’re better spending $300 on a rental machine to dig the holes than to set a post that isn’t deep enough. I’m in Canada where frost can be hell, my posts go 4’ down and usually 5 bags concrete per post, then another 3 bags down the post once it’s all assembled. Your 40’ fence I could easily put in 50 bags. Don’t base your shopping list on that, but know that if you care about longevity it takes patience and hard work, like anything else in life
Renting the machine also would be good for your back. Folks can underestimate how hard digging narrow holes in the ground can be.
I second that. I wanted to remove loam in the front garden (here it is 5cm top soil and then hard loam down to the center of the earth, it seems), so I could mix in sand and other stuff in order to actually get something growing there.
I started by shoveling two 90l buckets by hand, and wanted to go to the landfill with them. But up the road was a construction site. I stopped and asked, and they were happy to take my stuff - for free. I went back home and refilled the buckets, and returned to the construction site to dump them again. My back already was quite unhappy about that day, as the clay is rock hard and heavy up here.
There I saw them riding a front loader, and I asked them if they could drop by and just take a load or two with that. And they did. With just two runs they took out more than I could have done with a dozen runs on my own. They really saved my day, and my back. And it only cost me a case of beer.
4ft of concrete will be a nightmare to remove when the post needs to be replaced.
Realistically, one would just dig down half a foot, break up the concrete, cut the post, then backfill the dirt. Put any new post you need a foot to the side. No reason to remove the boulder.
I’ve pulled them before with shovels and a farm jack, and it is a nightmare, dangerous too. Now we have machinery to do it, or a truck and chain, wouldn’t do it manually any more