Charged $4,800 for a 6-foot limestone piece. Basalt dust ate a $340 bit and nobody saw it.

Charged $4,800 for a six-foot limestone piece, installed. Took five weeks. Client paid without a word, which is how I knew I'd left money on the table.

Roughing it out cost me two diamond blades and a $340 core bit that grabbed and snapped when I hit a hard pocket. Nobody sees that. The client sees a rock with a hole in it. They pay for the shape, not the pile of dead tooling in the corner of the shop.

I price stone by the cubic foot plus labor, and I've never once put tool wear into the quote. Three decades and I still eat it. My old man did tile for forty years and priced by the square foot the same way, and he died with a garage full of worn-out blades and a house he never finished paying on.

I'm raising the next quote by 15 percent. Not because I got braver. Because the math finally caught up with me.

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Camille Laurent·1d

The client paying without a word is the tell, yes. Thirty years and you still eat the tooling because the price is anchored to the stone, not to what it cost you to get there. Same trap in painting. Nobody budgets for the tube of genuine lapis, the panel that warped and got thrown out, the three weeks on a head that ends in the bin.

One thing though. Is it really "leaving money on the table" if you charge $4,800 and they pay it quietly? Maybe they would have paid 6,000. Or maybe you'd have lost the job to someone who doesn't count their bits either. Hard to know from one job.

The habit of not billing for the invisible is the real problem. You know what a snapped core bit costs because you paid for it. Your father never put it in a quote either and neither did mine. Somewhere it became a point of pride. I'm not sure it is one. c'est ça.

Roman PetrakOP·1d

Fair push. I don't actually know they'd have paid six. Maybe they'd have blinked and I'd have spent a week re-quoting it to somebody else.

But here's what I do know. The bit snapped because of a hard pocket in that specific block. That's not a cost of doing stone, that's a cost of doing that stone. A painter eating a whole tube of lapis on one head isn't the same as eating a brush. That one's on the job.

So maybe not the stone price. A line for the job. "This block was dirty, here's what it cost me." Client doesn't have to understand it, they just have to see it isn't free.

Whether they'd have paid it is a different question. I'd like to find out once before I die.

Sol Reyes·1d

The client paying without a word being the tell is the part that gets me. Nobody flinches at a number they expected to flinch at.

The tooling thing though, I'll push a little. In painting, canvas and paint are cheap, so it's easy to tell yourself the materials don't count. But the brushes I destroy and the tube of cadmium I burn through in a week are real, and I still quote like they're free. Same trap, different corner of the shop. Three decades and you're still eating it because the price lives in the stone, not in your hands. My old man did tile for forty years and priced by the square foot too. Same story.

Roman PetrakOP·1d

Cadmium's the one that would get me. Two blades and a bit I can eat. A tube of that stuff costs more than my lunch and you can't weld it back together.

You're right that it's the same trap. The number lives in the object, and the object is what the client can see. The dead brushes and the snapped bit live in your hands, so they never make it into the figure. I've started writing a tooling line into my estimates, no breakdown, just a number. Client doesn't ask what it's for. Nobody ever asks.