Estimating with Certainty: Cabinet & Countertop Replacement Labor

Looks like a few folks have already jumped on, so we're just gonna go ahead and get started right now.

‍

My name is Michael, I'm with the customer success team over here at Clear Estimates. And today, we're gonna talk about getting more confident with your estimating and how we can do that through the power of accurate local cost data. Now I don't need to tell you how challenging it can be to write up accurate estimates. Material costs fluctuate.

Clients are indecisive.

Estimating labor can be even tougher. How much time is this going to take? What rates should I expect to be paying out? Not uncommon to just end up ballparking a number, taking an educated guess on what to bill out for labor just to get an estimate out the door.

But this is where clear estimates is a game changer. We have accurate local cost data right at our fingertips, including labor rates that are updated for us automatically. So this way, we don't need to ballpark those figures. We don't need to guesstimate any man hours.

The system's not only going to save us time writing the estimate, but it's going to give us accurate locally sourced remodeling costs that we can use to price out our projects. So this way, we can build up our estimates quickly, confidently, and profitably using the most up to date costs from suppliers right in our region. Now a subscriber wrote in to me last week and he says, hey. I'm curious.

How flexible is the software? Let's say if my client is buying all the materials. So we're gonna do a couple of things at once here today. We're gonna jump into clear estimates.

We're gonna show you how easy it is to put together a cabinet replacement estimate. And we're also gonna show you how it's flexible for any situation we might run into, whether we're estimating materials or labor or both.

Now just a little background here. A ton of work goes in behind the scenes every quarter surveying regional suppliers to to give you accurate material pricing that you can use to build your estimates. And the result is we're gonna have this amazing database of up to date remodeling costs updated for us automatically every quarter. So this includes plenty of pricing for all things kitchen. So So flooring, cabinets, counters, sinks, vanities, appliances, you name it. And the system also saves us time building the estimate because we're gonna have about three hundred or so top notch templates for common jobs. And this is gonna include cabinet and counter replacement templates that save tons of time on those jobs.

And at the end of the day, it's gonna create a personalized professional proposal from our estimate that we can share with our client.

Now for labor, we look at a variety of statistics including contractor survey data to provide up to date hourly rate suggestions covering a variety of different trade types. So this way we can account for the crew's pay rate and labor burden right in the estimate without extra steps. Now these rates are gonna be regionally specific. They're already built into thousands of line items in your library and there's even going to be average labor hours built into each part so we don't have to guesstimate any man hours.

So this just makes it easy to price out both material and labor costs just by plugging in our measurements. And if you're working with subs, the system is flexible enough to plug in their rates on the go. So let's see how easy all of this is. We're gonna jump into clear estimates.

We're gonna put together just a simple countertop and cabinet replacement and, estimate in clear estimates. This is actually the estimate we're gonna build today. This is a takeoff I put together. I just went through the kitchen with my client, took all my measurements, and figured out everything we're gonna need to price out here.

So pretty simple estimate here. We're just gonna be pulling out some wall cabinets and an old countertop, installing a new granite countertop, and some base cabinets. And we're gonna install and hook up a new sink and faucet, a dishwasher, and this estimate is interesting because in this case, my client is picking up all the materials, so we're really just going to be estimating the labor cost. We'll show you how to handle that in the system.

So let's go ahead and jump in.

I'm gonna go ahead and stop my camera here just so you can see everything that's going on.

And when we first log in to clear estimates, we're gonna be taken right to this home page. This is kind of our dashboard for recent estimates we've worked on. This is also where we can start a new project. Now just a heads up, if you haven't logged into the system at all just yet, I do recommend taking a look at this quick tutorial that's here on the home page. This is gonna show you how to start a project, the general estimating process, so I recommend taking a look at this or one of our other getting started guides. I'm also gonna share out a resource here at the end of the presentation if you'd be interested in scheduling a one on one walk through call that's included in your trial subscription or if you're a paid subscriber, we'd be happy to schedule some time with you. But in this case, we're just gonna be putting together this pretty simple estimate once again for cabinets and countertop replacement.

Now one of the things you might wanna do when you first sign up is take a look at the labor rate suggestions. We could do that by finding our options tool right up here in the top right corner, And then we want to find our labor rate editor over here on the left, and this is where we can see the suggested rates for the location we chose, for our pricing. So I set up with Ann Arbor, Michigan. Keep in mind, you can always adjust your location if you want to use costs from a different area.

But right here we're gonna see suggested labor rates for all of these different trades. Now if you're curious what's included in these rates, you can hover over this rate, text right here and it's gonna give you a little explainer on what's included in all the rates. Just keep in mind these are more for an in house crew. These aren't a subcontractor's rate.

They don't include any markup.

That being said, you're gonna have these suggested rates already built into your parts and you can also make adjustments right here from the rate column if you charge a different amount per hour to do different tasks, and then you can quickly save changes here. So this way we don't have to update labor rates in every single part in our estimate. We can just do it on the fly right here in the labor rate editor and it'll apply those changes to future estimates.

But I'm gonna go ahead and just use the built in rate suggestions for my area. I'm gonna head back to my home page and once again this is where we get started a new project just by clicking new project, but in this case I've already set up a blank project here for cabinet countertop replacement. I'm gonna go ahead and click this project title and that's gonna open up this estimate. So that once again, just a blank project I set up.

Now when I click that, it's gonna take me right to the projects page and this is where all the estimating takes place in clear estimates. It's right here on the projects page. So if you are building up a job, you wanna make sure you're right here on this page and everything really involves adding parts into your estimate. Now a part's just a line item.

It's something with a description and a cost that prices out a scope of work and we have a library of about fifteen thousand line items for common remodeling work that we can look through and add into our project. There's also gonna be pre built templates. These are an enormous time saver when it comes to estimating. We're gonna be taking a look at all of this today.

The first thing I wanna do before we dive too deep into that estimate is take a look at what costs are available for a kitchen remodeler in the system. So to do that, I'm going to go ahead and find this button right here, browse part library. This is going to pull up the full catalog of cost data from clear estimates. Now keep in mind everything sorted by category, so I can use this category drop down to browse through the different types of costs.

Should be roughly chronological to the way you'd be doing the work in your project. We're starting off with prep work, then there's a number of categories for demolition costs. Further down in the list, we're gonna start getting into the building portions for things like concrete, masonry, and framing. So you can see there's so much built in for a remodeling contractor right out of the box.

Now for kitchens, let's take a look at a couple of different categories of parts here. So for example, if we wanted to take a look at some kitchen plumbing, I'm gonna select this category here for kitchen and laundry plumbing. Now when I click this category, it's gonna show me all of the line items built into this category down here below. And we could see that we have descriptions, we have material costs and labor hours built into all of these different parts.

Once again, specific from our region. And this just makes it really easy to go through this list of parts, choose what we need and plug in a quantity. Now since there is so many different parts built into this category, we can use this middle drop down to get more specific here. So under kitchen laundry plumbing, we've got costs for kitchen and laundry rough in, removing existing fixtures, and then further down, we're gonna get into specific material costs like kitchen sinks, faucets, disposers, dishwashers, and so on.

So you can see there's so much built in, just for the kitchen plumbing here. So for example, if I wanna grab kitchen sink, keep in mind a lot of times you can sort by type of sink or type of part using this third part group drop down right over here. So this is where we could sort sinks by stainless steel or enameled or enameled cast iron. So let's go ahead and grab kitchen sink stainless steel, and then we can just kind of look through this list.

It's going to narrow this down a little bit for us and then we can just go ahead and grab the part we need. So let's say we wanted to go ahead and grab this kitchen sink part and this allows us to just very quickly plug in a quantity. We've already got the cost defined for us and this allows us as an estimator just to plug in our quantity into this blue bar. Let's say we wanted to price out three sinks, we can plug in three.

That's gonna give us the material cost for three sinks and then we can quickly add the part to our estimate.

So let's go back to search here and let's do this again. Let's take a look at, you know, since we are gonna be doing, cabinet and countertop estimate, we can take a look at what's included there. And under thirty two cabinets and countertops, we're looking at cost for removing kitchen cabinets, installing base cabinets, installing wall cabinets.

Specific material costs for base cabinets, wall cabinets, specialty kitchen cabinets, and a variety of different grades here. And a little bit further down the list, we can find things like kitchen countertops. So if I wanna go ahead and grab kitchen countertops, once again, I can sort by type of countertop over here.

Countertop removal, laminates, solid surface, granite. Let's go ahead and grab granite countertops.

And once again, this is just gonna narrow down our part search. So we're just looking at a handful of options with costs built in for each. I'm gonna go ahead and grab this first part for install granite countertop, no backsplash, standard edge average. I'm gonna go ahead and click that part and once again, it's gonna pull up this part preview where we can see there's already labor costs and material costs built in for this part.

And what it's looking for is the square footage of the countertop surface. So let's just say for example, this was the counter we were gonna be building. So it's about fifteen linear feet long, twenty four inches in-depth, so about thirty square feet of countertop surface. So let's go back here into the part.

We're just gonna go ahead and plug in thirty square feet. That's gonna price out our material and labor. Now like we were saying, if our client's picking up the material cost, before I add this part into my project, I can just very quickly uncheck material cost. This way it's a labor only cost and then we'll go ahead and add that part into our project.

If I close out of here, we can see what we did. We just added this single part to our estimate. We have our cost built into it. Since this is a pre markup cost, we can then later apply markup to the project So this way we can make a profit on that. So you can see how easy it is to just really look through the library of costs, find an item, price it out, add it into the job here.

So let's go ahead back into the library. Let's take a look at what else is available. So maybe you need to do some tile flooring in a kitchen. We're gonna have a whole category for floor coverings here.

This is gonna include labor costs to install flooring, as well as things like sub floor and underlayment. And then further down, we're gonna get into things like like ceramic tile flooring, stone flooring, carpeting, wood plank, vinyl wood plank flooring. So there's so much built in right out of the box. If we needed to price out something like drywall, let's head over into wall coverings.

And then we have all of these different choices built in for different types of drywall, standard, moisture resistant, small area, fire rated. So you can see how easy it is to just kind of browse through this list, find what we need, plug in our quantity, then we can make any adjustments to the costs as needed and add that part into our project.

So with all of that being said, let's go ahead and dive into this actual estimate here. So once again, this is a takeoff. It's just everything I need to do for this specific estimate, and we're just gonna be pulling out some old wall cabinets and we're gonna be installing a new countertop and some base cabinets, dishwasher and a sink here.

Now to save a little bit of time on this estimate, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use one of the pre built templates for cabinets and I'm gonna use one of the pre built templates for countertops here to build out my estimate. So I'm gonna go ahead and click this option here for add template.

And again, a template is just a pre built estimate. It's designed to save us time and we have about three hundred or so pre built templates for common jobs. Now if I scroll down here in my category list to kitchens, and use this middle drop down to select a specific kitchen template. So we're looking at templates for base cabinet replacement, wall cabinet replacement, backsplash replacement, cooktop replacement.

And then a little further down in the list, we'll actually get into new build kitchen templates. So these are complete new kitchens and remodel templates in a variety of grades, average, economy, premium grade, even major kitchen remodel templates. And it's great because this is just a list of suggested items that are commonly seen in different types of projects and it's gonna try to cover as much ground as possible. This way, we don't have to search for all these items one by one.

Now, let's go ahead and take a look at what we have for cabinets.

And so here I have a couple of different templates for base cabinet replacement. In this case, it's gonna be premium grade base cabinets. I'm gonna go ahead and grab base cabinet replacement premium and then it's just gonna be a handful of items that are commonly seen in this type of a cabinet replacement. Now what's nice about these templates is that they all have formulas attached that tie back to this overall template quantity right up here at the top right.

And what this allows me to do as an estimator is just plug in how many linear feet of cabinets need to be replaced here. So looking at my takeoff, I have twelve linear feet of new base cabinets that need to be installed. So let's just go ahead and plug this in as our template quantity. So twelve linear feet, and we'll go ahead and click calculate quantities.

And this is gonna price out all of the items in this template at twelve linear feet automatically for me. Now you do wanna think about these as a starting point. You wanna just compare what the template is suggesting to your takeoff and just make sure that everything looks correct here. So in this template, I've just got a handful of items.

I have one for installing premium grade base cabinets and another for removing kitchen cabinets, base or wall. Now, it's suggesting twelve linear feet for the removal, but actually what's happening in this estimate is I'm removing old wall cabinets eighteen linear feet of them. So all I need to do here in the template is just find that removal and adjust that to eighteen linear feet and that's gonna dial in my price for removing eighteen linear feet of cabinets. And then I have my twelve linear feet of new base cabinet install right here.

Now in this case, I'm not actually gonna be hauling away the old cabinets here. They're actually gonna be keeping those around, so I'm gonna go ahead and uncheck this part because I won't need that priced out in my estimate, and then I'm just gonna add these remaining two items into my project to get started here.

Now we also needed to price out this new granite countertop with backsplash.

So we're gonna be installing that for them. So let's go back in to add templates and let's see what we have available for that. So once again, I'm gonna head into kitchens, and then we want countertop replacement.

And then we have a whole bunch of different options for countertop replacement. What I'm looking for is granite. Here's granite. Yes.

Here here we go. So granite with integral sink. So we're gonna go ahead and grab granite with integral sink. Remember there's a lot of times these template descriptions that give you a little more information about what's included in the template.

Always recommend taking a look at those descriptions and then here we have all of these parts for our countertop replacement. Now let's go ahead and take a look at how many linear feet. So we need fifteen linear feet of new granite countertop, and we're gonna plug that in as our template quantity. So fifteen linear feet, and we'll go ahead and calculate it.

And then it's gonna suggest these quantities for these different parts. So at this point, I can go through and just double check everything, make sure it's correct. So we do have fifteen linear feet of countertop we need removed.

We are gonna be, installing a new sink, but we're not gonna be providing it. So I see this material cost for a kitchen sink. I'm gonna go ahead and uncheck this so it doesn't get added into my project. And then I have my labor cost for installing the sink and faucet right here. We have a miscellaneous labor for plumbing, since we are gonna be doing the hookup on that sink.

Then I have thirty square feet of granite countertop, and remember we're looking at our countertop. That's just what we need since this is twenty four inches in-depth, fifteen feet long. So we do need thirty square feet of granite countertop.

Here is fifteen linear feet of backsplash, and this last part here is for installing an integral single bowl sink. I'm not gonna be doing that. Once again, I'm not picking up the materials here, so we're just gonna go ahead and uncheck that. Now keep in mind as I'm customizing the parts in these templates and I'm unchecking things, this isn't gonna affect the default settings for this template.

It really allows me to fine tune it for this specific job and save the time of looking for these parts one by one. So everything looks good here and now we're set to add all of these parts to the project in bulk. So we're gonna do that by clicking add template down here. This is gonna copy and paste all of those parts here into my project.

Now I'm not done because there's a few more things I need to do. Some of those parts in that template did include material costs. So we can see there's material lines for the base cabinets and the countertop here as well as the backsplash, but I can very easily just open these parts with pencil in my estimate and remove that material cost very quickly. So just a handful of clicks, we can customize these parts for a labor only situation.

This way we're only dealing with labor costs.

Great. So we filled out a lot of our estimate using a couple of those prebuilt templates. You can see what a major time saver those are. There's a couple more things we're gonna need to do here. We're gonna need to clean up our work area, and we do want to, install this new dishwasher. So we need to make sure that the designer dishwasher we're installing that we're billing out for labor for that. So let's go ahead and search the part library.

Let's say designer dishwasher.

Here is a part for provide and install a designer dishwasher designer. I'm gonna go ahead and grab this. Once again, they're picking up the material for this, and this is just labor only. Everything looks good. I have a built in rate, and let's go ahead and add that part in.

And then I also wanna clean up my work area. So I'm just gonna type in first floor cleanup, and let's go ahead and grab this part here. First floor cleanup one hundred to two hundred square feet, and I just need quantity one. That's just a single labor cost.

We're gonna add that part into our project and then let's just double check. Make sure everything else is accounted for and yes. That's everything I'm gonna need for this specific estimate. You can see we haven't even been on that long.

Just a few minutes here, we've already gotten this entire estimate all priced out. Just a handful of things we need to do before we send this over to our client. So first of all, we want to double check our markup settings down here. Keep in mind that all of the part costs and labor rates are pre markup.

They don't include any markup for us, so we can use these markup toggles down here in the markup tool to apply a percentage for material and labor markup. And then just above, we're gonna have a breakdown of the actual cost of the project, the dollar amount of markup being applied, and the number at the end of the day for our client is right here. This is called your base bid. So it's never gonna show your markup to your client.

It's just gonna roll that into the total project cost here.

And then down here, we can always adjust the markup as needed.

Another thing I did was I added in a miscellaneous item cost for sales tax since there's no tax included in the cost data here. These are really easy to set up. You just click the plus, plug in a description, tell it how to calculate and save it, and then we can account for sales tax in the estimate as well.

So let's really quick just take a look at the proposal. We'll take a look at the fruits of our labor here. We're gonna come up here to this eyeball button, view report, and then we're gonna click print to PDF, and this is gonna pull up the document that we're gonna be sharing with the homeowner here.

Great. So here is my formal proposal. You can see it's personalized, has my company logo here. I added this when I signed up.

You can always add this in your options tool. I also added in a paragraph of legal language up here at the top. This appears on all my documents. And then we could see the estimate contents itself.

So we could see we didn't type any of this out. We didn't look up any of these rates. Clear estimates is just gonna automatically print out a professional sentence of text that explains the scope of work to the homeowner in language so that they can understand. And then down here, we have my sales tax itemized.

We have a total cost inclusive of my markup and a nice place my client can sign the agreement. So it just makes it so easy to put together estimates for replacement work all the way up to a full kitchen remodel or really anything under the remodeling umbrella clear estimates is built to handle. Now back in the project here, we can do a few more things still. So let's say we had a couple of different rooms in which we are gonna be installing cabinets.

We can always set up components, what are called components, which are just a way you could organize the estimate by room or by phase of the job. If you're curious how this works in the software, you can just hover over this question mark and click more information and it'll walk you right through that. Also, let's say we wanted to give them some different options in terms of different cabinet styles, we can set that up using alternates, which are just a way to set up change orders or showing options on the proposal without calculating them into the bid. That's what an alternate will do for you.

So if you're curious how that works, once again, just hover over this question mark. There's gonna be more information here that'll walk you through exactly how to use that tool.

And that's really about all there is to it. Oh, actually, there was one more thing I wanted to show you really quick. So let's say we were working with a subcontractor and we wanted to plug in our subs rate for one of these parts. We can go ahead and open this with the pencil. You could do this even when you're first adding a part into your project beginning.

And let's go ahead and show you how to plug in a sub cost. So, I went ahead and unchecked my labor cost for this part. This is, install premium grade base cabinets. Maybe a sub is coming in to do the labor.

We could go ahead and enable the subcontractor cost and then there's a variety of ways we can calculate it. If we know how many hours it's gonna take them per unit, we can plug that in here. But more often than not, your subs just gonna give you a total cost to do the job. So what you can do is click where it says hours per unit right here in blue, switch this over to lump sum.

And there's actually a couple of different options. You know, if I had a per unit cost, maybe a cost per square foot or per linear foot to do work, we can use this option here. But more often with a subcontractor, they're just gonna give us a total cost for the job. Let's go ahead and grab lump sum and this just allows us to just plug in a number.

So let's say they gave us five hundred dollars in subcontractor cost. We can plug that right into the estimate here and save it, and then we'll be able to use our subcontractor markup down here, to mark up the subcontractor cost as well. So it's really flexible whether you're using subs or in house crew. Just make sure to double check these markup settings.

Make sure you account for things like tax, and then we can get this estimate out the door.

So that's really about all there is to it. So you can see how quickly we were able to assemble this estimate using up to date labor costs from our area and how easy it was to modify this into a labor only estimate. Now like I mentioned, our focus is really this cost data. We draw on a number of data sources to provide you with reliable costs, and these material costs are updated for you automatically every quarter, labor rates updated for you annually. Now as a subscriber, you're also gonna receive our quarterly behavior index monitoring change in material cost over time and changes seen per region for different material types. So it's gonna save you that time researching the cost, typing out the estimates, drafting invoices. This is all gonna be handled for you automatically, which is just gonna make you so much more confident in your estimating.

Now while we still have a few minutes here, I do wanna share out a few quick resources for you.

First off, if you have questions about clear estimates before you sign up, we'd love to chat. Feel free to schedule a demo here with our team. This is a QR code. You can scan this.

It'll take you right to our calendar where you can schedule some time with us. You can also just head to the link that's listed there at the bottom and you'll see the calendar. You'll be able to schedule some time with our team if you have questions before signing up. Now if you're ready to just go ahead and get started, go ahead and start a free thirty day trial.

You can use this QR code, sign up for a free trial here. It's the full version of the tool free for thirty days. There's no limitations during the trial. It's the same software you'd be working with in your paid subscription. We even offer walk through calls with your trial. So this is a QR code to go ahead and start that trial, or just head to clear estimates dot com.

And if you've already signed up for a free trial or you're a current subscriber and you just like to learn how to use the system a little more in-depth, feel free to schedule a full walk through call with us. This QR code will take you to a calendar to schedule a training call with our team. So if you're still unclear on anything and or how the system works or you still just have questions, feel free to book some time. We'll be able to connect to your screen and walk you through your account right on your end.

And this is included in your trial. Like I said, no extra cost, so feel free to book some time. And if you do just have general questions about the presentation or the software or you just wanna get in touch, reach us at support at clear estimates dot com. Keep in mind, there's also chat support available in the site and in the tool nine to five eastern, Monday through Friday.

So I do wanna thank everyone so much for joining in with us today. Like I said, feel free to book some time if you do have follow-up questions, and we look forward to catching up with you at the next one.

‍