Hardwood pricing!

UKworkshop.co.uk

Help Support UKworkshop.co.uk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

mailee

Established Member
Joined
26 Jun 2005
Messages
5,502
Reaction score
4
Location
grimsby Humberside
Hi guys, I have just finished pricing up a set of gates for a guy in Oak and was amazed at the price to say the least! Don't know if I am a bit steep on my prices or what but what about this. The gates are double six footers with a curved top and diagonal T&G boards in the four panels. Timber costings for it in Oak is £567.23 Taking into account the hinges and fittings, all the ancillaries for building it and my charge it comes out at £1123.00! I normally work with softwood for most of my projects due to the cost of Hardwood I think I now know why. I have not told the customer the price yet and think he may go for the softwood version at less than half the price. Is this normal for hardwoods or am I too high on my prices for this medium? :?
 
I made a pair of arched gates like you described a while back out of sapele .
Timber was £800 and my labour was £800 so if anything your going in cheap id say .
 
I think £1500 would be a pretty good price. What you said is definitely too low. Offer them the softwood as well, of course. People do tend to judge the worth of things by their price, if you ask lots they will tend to think it's worth lots, and they may just be in the mood for a really nice pair of gates

John
 
I've just made a Perpendicular Arched top Postern Gate 32" wide by 6'2" high at the peak, from ENGLISH Oak, which I had machined TG&B at a finished thickness of 1" and the cost of the timber was £595.
 
It sounds to me as though you've costed the project based on kilned oak? (If it helps to know it, for my projects I source local Welsh kilned oak for between £15 and 30 per cubic foot, probably over 95% of it at the bottom end figure.)

Why not offer a quote in green oak? That's what I'd use if I was making gates for home. (About £10 per cube here.)

Bill
 
For a comparison figure on your oak have you contacted John Boddy and asked them for a figure on air dried (not kilned) oak? Personally, I'd avoid green oak and go for air dried (circa 16 to 20% RH) as it will simply shrink, especially in the summer heat. Also the price per cube can be quite misleading - it doesn't take into account wastage, waney edges, transport costs, etc, which can all be quite high. Out of interest I've just costed some signs made from 2 x 8in Canadian red cedar - the timber worked out at just under £40/cubic foot + VAT, which I reckoned made it more expensive than oak.

As for your price being too high, I don't think it is. I feel that many woodworkers have a tendency to price themselves too low. I've just had a quote to respray my van - when I asked the hourly rate they told me it was £30 which puts my charge rate in context..... :?

Scrit
 
mailee, if your timber costs alone are ~$567 I'd expect your mark up on that to be a minimum of 25% = £142. It probably ought to be higher than 25%. After all, how much time and effort do you have to go to to source the material, and then you have to go and pick it up too, which is about how much your time is worth and what your vehicle costs are.

You mention that on top of that there are other expenses such as hardware-- let's say a cost to you of £40, plus your time and vehicle costs again to pick it all up, so mark these up as well at say 25% = £10, which probably will cause you to lose money.

So if we add up your material costs and mark-ups we have, 567 + 142 + 40 + 10 = £759:- your charge for materials to the customer. Incidentally, £567 would get you about 19ft³ of air dried oak at a higher end price of £30/ft³ including VAT. Typically there's a 125% waste factor for air dried, waney edged oak. The waste factor I use for kiln dried square edged english oak is 80%, but you won't be using this for exterior gates.

Your final charge to the client you reckon is going to be £1132. Subtract from this the charges we already know about, i.e., £759 and you're left with £364. Your profit for the labour element and delivery of the completed gates has to come out of this. At a pretty standard sort of rate for joinery work of £30 an hour you need to be able to build and deliver the gates in about 12 hours hrs.. Installation would be a separate job.

Unfortunately I suspect you're a bit on the light side with your prices if you are trying to make a living at this kind of work. However, if this is a new venture for you and a learning experience, or you're only working this kind of job as a sideline perhaps a return that small is okay.

Mind you, processing 19 ft³ of rough sawn oak alone to get it basically square so you can do something useful with it is a **** of a lot of work, ha, ha. On the other hand maybe your price for the oak is a machined PAR price meaning there's much less wood to handle. Slainte.
 
Well thanks for the replies guys. I guess I am too low on my pricing in hardwood. I usually work on the idea of pricing up the timber and then just doubling this for the final figure which then includes my time and any ancilliaries. As it is not my full time employment this seems to work fine with most things I build which are softwood usually. I haven't built anything in hardwood for quite some time now and was astonished at the price of it. I think the customer will have them built in softwood but will present him with the price of both of course. On another note my local hardwood timber yard is on a shutdown at the moment and won't be trading again until September! Another reason I don't use hardwood much as it is hard to come by in this neck of the woods. Thanks again guys, I feel more reassured in my pricing now. :)
 
Funnily enough mailee, it's quite common in the furniture making business to mark up the cost of materials by 100%. This becomes the re-sale price. For example, your cost of £500 inc. VAT becomes £1000 plus VAT. The mark up is to cover the cost of your time sourcing and pricing the material, your time visiting the yard, selecting the goods, and the cost of running your vehicle, and for storage of the material in your premises. There are other costs, but these will do for now.

Then, after that, you start charging for your time at whatever you charge per hour to build the project and, lastly, there's a delivery charge too!

Luckily in your case this is just part-time to you. You're not trying to make a living at what you're doing so the profit motive is not too strong.

However, on a side note, I find it incredible that working woodworkers often don't mark up their materials either. They resell them at cost which means they take a thumping great loss on the sale of all their materials. No other business I'm aware of seems to have people in it operating this way.

Car parts are typically marked up over cost by between 250% and 350%. Department stores sell furniture with mark-ups of between 300% and 400%.

Have you ever wondered how department stores can afford 50% and 75% mark downs at sale time? Now you know, because if you knock 75% off something you originally marked up by 400% you're still selling it at 25% over your purchase price.

These marked down sales are not profitable in the whole scheme of running a retail business I agree, but it clears the old lines out so you can re-stock with the latest trendier offerings that'll fly off the shelves like hot cakes, you hope, ha, ha. Slainte.
 
Sgian Dubh":2fe6agt8 said:
Have you ever wondered how department stores can afford 50% and 75% mark downs at sale time? Now you know, because if you knock 75% off something you originally marked up by 400% you're still selling it at 25% over your purchase price.

A mate of mine in the haulage industry delivers containerloads of leather 3-piece suites that arrive in from Italy,to several Barker and Stonehouse stores around the northeast.

B&S normal price - £2,600

Sale price,50% off - £1,300

Price per suite,shipped and delivered from Italy - £300 :shock:

Andrew
 
Back
Top