Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Back in the saddle again

I hope everyone had a wonderful Memorial Day. Mom! I just realized we never put the flag on the porch. Man. I hate that we forgot that. That's the best part.

Anyway, we went to Mom and Dad's house and the girls swam and the puppies played and the whole group ate. Then we left and two chillins went to sleep on the ride home and the other went down as soon as her special bed was put together. (She had acquired a fever during the festivities.) It was a simple night. It was lovely.

A few weeks ago, Mom and I went around to a lot of stores in the area and priced the lumber for the privacy fence that we are hoping to have built. The lowest priced store had an estimate of $1000 and that was with an over-estimate of how many feet of yard we are going to cover.  When we got home last night there was a job estimate from our neighbor (that we have been waiting 2 weeks to get. grrrrr). He wanted to give us a bid for the fence and we told him that was fine but we were going to go with the lowest priced bidder. Do you know what his quote was?!!! $2650!!!!! Excuse me, mister, but I happen to know that the lumber is less than $1000 and that is a lot of moolah for labor. Especially when we are only working with $3333 and have a long list that we want to be able to check off.   Do you think that was reasonable? Am I way off on what to expect when it comes to paying for labor?  I have another man coming today and I really hope that his quote is much lower.

Jason built us a raised vegetable garden a couple of nights ago. I'm very excited about it but once we got the frame we realized that we don't have any dirt. It seems like dirt would be an easy thing to get but apparently not. By the time we get all of this figured out it will probably be fall.

What should I cook for supper?

4 comments:

Chad & Bonny Day said...

YOu have seen our backyard right? It's tiny! We have had a few estimates on our yard and it would have cost us around $3000 to get a privacy fence in our back yard. Yuck. They are expensive!!

nanny said...

Chicken. you can do so much with it.

CAB said...

I don't think we've ever met, but I found your blog from Katie's - enjoy your enthusiasm - kiddos are adorable - we started a tiny, I mean, tiny, raised veg. garden a few weeks back - so far so good - hope yours will all come together - took 6 - 40 lb. bags of dirt to fill ours up - yikes - I've been pricing sprinkler systems - not cheap either!

Anonymous said...

i had a medium sized area fenced with chain link for our dogs two years ago and it was $1650. For chain link. I think that just like with cars, labor is the most expensive part, not the parts, or in your case lumber. :(

hope you get your fence!
holli j.