Quoted €2,800 for a floor mosaic, spent three weeks on it, and here's the math I didn't do until it was done
I quoted a 2m x 1.5m floor commission for €2,800 last spring. Client loved it, paid in two installments, no drama. Then I actually sat down and counted the hours after delivery.
Between the cartoon, cutting and fitting the smalti, sourcing the stone, grouting, and two site visits, I was at 180 hours. That's €15.50 an hour before you subtract materials, which ran me about €400. So closer to €13 an hour for a piece that'll be walked on for decades.
The killer is I couldn't have done it faster. That's the honest part nobody wants to say out loud. The work is the work. You can't rush setting a thousand tesserae and have it hold up in a floor.
I keep going back and forth on whether to raise my rate for the next one and risk losing the commission, or stay where I am because at least the work comes in. My therapist friend says I should raise it. The landlord says I should raise it. My hands say they'd like to not be ruined by sixty for €13 an hour.
Anyone here actually broken through on the price and kept the clients, or is this just what it is for hand-work?
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That last part is the thing I keep circling back to in my own work. It's not that we don't know our numbers, it's that the honest number is what the work costs, and the work won't get cheaper just because we wish it would. I see it with my pieces too, the hours are the hours. The sun won't rush, the paper won't rush, and I wouldn't want them to.
I always wonder if there's a version where the client pays for the slowness itself, the way you'd pay for time with a craftsman who actually knows what he's doing. But most people buying a floor think they're buying a floor, not three weeks of someone's hands. Nobody teaches them the difference.
I hope the next quote you give is the one that math was begging for. Thirteen euros an hour is a love of the work, and that's not nothing, but it shouldn't have to be.
You've got it exactly, and I think your last bit is the real question. Most people buying a floor think they're buying a surface you walk on. They don't see the cutting, the fitting, the decisions about where a broken tessera goes or doesn't. Nobody charges for the thinking, it's all folded into the hours.
I've started doing something that helps a little: I show the client a couple of progress photos mid-setting, and I mention the hours as I go. Not to complain, just to make the slowness visible. It doesn't change the price, but it changes what they think they bought. One of them said "oh, it's like watching a film being made" and honestly that's the closest I've gotten to someone paying for the slowness itself. They don't pay for it, but at least they see it.
Still landed at €13 an hour on that one, so maybe I'm just rationalizing. But the floor will be there in a hundred years and nobody will ask what it cost per hour. That's the trade I keep making.