Two quotes, twenty thousand dollars apart, both honest

It is a common experience. Three companies walk the same yard, and the prices come back at $28,000, $41,000, and $52,000. The instinct is that somebody is overcharging. Usually nobody is. The three quotes describe three different projects that happen to share an address.

Where the gap lives

Almost all of it is in work that will be invisible on handover day.

Base rock under paving. A patio on four inches of compacted aggregate and a patio on two inches of loose rock look identical the week they are finished. They stop looking identical after the second wet winter.

Soil preparation. Decompaction and amendment run $1.50 to $4 per square foot. A quote that includes it for 2,000 square feet of planting carries $3,000 to $8,000 that another quote simply does not have.

Drainage. Where does surface water go, and in what pipe? A quote that names the outlet has designed for it. A quote that does not has assumed the problem away.

Wall assembly. Drain rock, perforated pipe with a real outlet, filter fabric, geogrid, backfill compacted in lifts. All buried, all essential, and all easy to leave out of a price.

Plant sizes. Fifteen 15 gallon shrubs and fifteen 1 gallon shrubs are the same line on a plant list and several thousand dollars apart.

The questions that make quotes comparable

• What depth of base rock goes under each paved surface, and is it compacted in lifts?
• What soil preparation is included in the planted areas, to what depth, and with what amendment?
• Where does surface and roof water discharge, and what pipe carries it there?
• For any retaining wall: what height from the bottom of the footing, and what is the drainage assembly behind it?
• How many irrigation zones, what emitter type, and who programmes the controller at handover?
• What container size is each plant, and who warrants establishment?
• Who pulls any permit the design needs?

Seven questions. Asked of three companies, they usually collapse a confusing spread into an obvious ranking, and quite often the middle quote turns out to be the complete one.

One more thing worth having in writing

What happens if the ground turns up something unexpected. Around Folsom that means rock, an old concrete footing under the lawn, or an unmarked irrigation line. It is a normal discovery, not a failure, and the right response is a written change order with pricing before work continues rather than a surprise line on the final invoice.

The cost guide has unit pricing for every item above, which makes it possible to sanity-check a quote line by line instead of reacting to a total.