Part 3: Hard landscaping
10. Costing
As you are deigning you should be working roughly to your client’s budget, this means estimating costs as you go along so that you don’t end up wasting time designing something they can’t afford.
Once your design is complete you need to cost all the elements of the design including:
- materials
- labour
- insurance
- consumables
- vehicles
- machinery/equipment hire.
As you price more jobs, you will discover that you start to know many of the costs well enough to easily estimate your design as you go along and you will develop spreadsheets with many of your commonly costed items, which makes it quicker every time you do a costing. You will also start to develop relationships with suppliers and know where to find the best quality or best priced items.
Some designers present their clients with an ‘on budget’ design and an ‘over budget’ design and often clients are tempted to spend a bit more once they see what they could have with a bigger budget.
Look at some websites of landscape materials suppliers. Find some products such as paving, walling stone, decking or fencing that you like and have a look at how much different types cost. You may want to think about sustainability, is the stone paving imported from the other side of the world? Is the timber from sustainable forests?