We are often asked about installation cost of paver products, and as a rule of thumb you can most probably calculate that installation cost may be double the cost of your pavers, it is at this point in a conversation that some customers may think that the Paving contractor has gone nuts and they want to run :), yet it is a fact that high quality workmanship will cost you more than the low quality jobs that became so frequent in the past few years, mostly from taking someone sitting in front of the local hardware store at half the price of your pavers.
Let me try and explain the factors impacting the price, the quality and ultimately your wallet over the longer term.
The cost of a standard paver on a driveway today would most probably be in the region of R325, excluding your pavers, and that would be the minimum that a quality contractor would charge to get a quality job done with such a standard paver, remember other larger and designer pavers would increase the costs to properly lay such avers (Weight and Design factors playing a large role in that calculation)
Let us look at a 10 square meter paving project for our calculations using a standard paver brick to cover such an area:
Working at an excellent cost price of about R110 per square meter for the bricks at ex factory price (not yet delivered and taking minimum quantities of about 27 pallets in this specific case), which would require the contractor to invest in nearly 30k on the specific/average order quantity and mix quantity in which this R110 would be included, would equate to R1,100 for the 10 squares to be covered for the pavers.
Now this would be without any transport cost, and in this case I am going to work on a trip within 10km from the factory/yard and I am assuming the transport would go directly from source to destination, which in many cases do not hold true as most yards deliver to yard and then based on demand would transport to customer, yet for this calculation we are going to assume an optimum arrangement, transport in this case I have calculated at a minimum of R1,000 (which would be very well priced transport costs), therefore this would be a whopping R100 per square meter.
On site the minimum would be one skilled worker and two general labourers, which in my case would be permanent staff as we do not use day labourers at customer sites, and minimum salary costs will be used, which again is not really a real world scenario as minimum wage would not provide you with regular on the job staff as they will start falling into the "private job" trap and you will have lower quality workmanship workers on minimum pay, yet we will use that for this calculation, thus three workers on site would cost you about R600 minimum, reality is closer to R800/R900, thus R60 per square meter.
Preparation and Paving I am going to work on a minimum of two days, yet that is if site is perfectly prepared, no removals of old paving and all materials and equipment being on site, starting at 07:00 and having a weather perfect day, no load-shedding, no dogs that distract workers, ample space to work and in general a perfect world, thus R1,200 for labour to do the paving, or R120 per square meter.
Additional materials, such as sand, plaster, cement, plastic sheets would equate to approx R310 in total (not taking into consideration minimum quantities you can order some of the materials at, which results in additional costs that will not appear in this calculation, thus we have R31 per square meter.
Taking machinery costs into consideration, such as Compactor and in most cases some cutting machinery such as Grinders, would add an additional R1,400 per day, with a minimum of one day as the calculation used in this case to once again take a perfect world as the basis, therefore we have R140 per square for this machinery that we will use during this job.
For Grouting we have made an assumption of R5.14 per square.
Thus before I have added any margin for the business, or any of the additional costs such as transport to and from the site, and increases in fuel prices, unforeseen and other hidden cost we can see that the pavers were at R110 per square and the rest of the costs were R396 rounded, nearly four times the pavers for this project, of course as project sizes increase we will have lower cost per square meter on some of the items listed above, yet I think this provides the reader with a little bit of an insight to how difficult realistic, yet economical acceptable from customer perspective the calculation becomes.
The contractor will obviously sharpen our pencils all the time and aim to have a balance between an acceptable deal from customer perspective, yet a quality offering from a product and service perspective, and with each site being different (waterways, layout, access, levelling requirements, extractions etc), so they may look at each quotation we do in an earnest manner to find that balance, and we discuss each quote with customer to find a balance.
Some may say but it is then better to use a "front of hardware store guy", let's call him "The Bloke", as the savings may prove to be significant, yet we have consistently seen some of the following issues that would have to be carefully considered prior to going that route:
The Bloke may arrive without machinery, which will either require the customer to then rent the machinery, or have a sub standard job that was not compacted properly, cutting jobs that are done by breaking methods and not clean cuts, resulting in uneven lines on your paving installation.
The Bloke may take much longer and then start the common issue of saying that the team needs to be paid and that he underestimated the job, therefore the customer starts being placed under pressure to pay team in Friday paydays, this happens rather often and have led to some very uncomfortable situations before for some customers.
The Blokes guarantees my be very difficult to find and enforce after The Bloke left the site and job is considered done, especially if you start having sagging, rain water channeling issues and movement of the actual pavers, these are very difficult to fix after the job is done and will leave you with heavy frustrations, not to mention higher costs if paving needs to be lifted again and redone.
The Bloke may have miscalculated the quantity of materials needed, which often happens to get you to accept the quote, only to come back after the job is started and requesting more bricks/cement/sand
The above is just a few points to consider when going the cheaper route, and it is better advised to ask the contractor to sharpen their pencils, discuss the cost calculations and agree a fair price than trying to take shortcuts.
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