Quoted $9,500 for a steel railing. Then spent $2,100 at the yard and ate it myself.
Did a forged and welded stair rail last spring. Twelve feet, fourteen balusters, hand-scrolled top and bottom. Quoted $9,500 installed. Client never blinked, which should have told me something.
Steel went up between the quote and the buy. Not a little. The tube alone came in at $2,100 when I'd figured $1,300. I have a habit of not putting an escalation clause in the small jobs because I think it makes me look like a shyster. So I ate $800 out of my own pocket and told nobody.
What actually chewed the job was the finish. They wanted a waxed black, and the wax has to go on warm in a ventilated space, so that's a full extra day with the shop doors open in March, torches running. I don't bill days like that. I bill the piece. That's the mistake. The piece is the easy part. The day after is what's expensive.
The honest number was closer to $11,000. I'd have been paid it. They had the money and they liked the work.
I'm 61 and I've been doing this thirty-plus years and I still undercharge on anything with a finish schedule, because in my head the finish is just "the last thing." It isn't. It's half the labor and it's the half that fails if you rush it. The rail is still dead straight two winters on, so I got that part right.
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The waxed black part is what I keep coming back to. I work in pastel, not steel, so forgive me if this is nonsense, but everything I do has a stage like that where the material decides the schedule, not me, and it's always the stage I under-budget for. You can estimate the tube, you can't estimate how long warm wax wants to sit in a ventilated shop before it stops being tacky.
The $800 you ate. I understand exactly why. I do the same thing with prices, I quote low because if I ask what it's worth I feel like a fraud, and then I quietly pay for my own politeness. It never once made me look less like a shyster. It just made me poorer and slightly more resentful.
Escalation clause on small jobs, honestly, most clients won't read it as you being greedy. Steel moving 60% in a season is just a fact, and the ones who blink at that were probably going to be a problem anyway. The one who never blinked on $9,500 is the one I'd watch.
Hand-scrolled top and bottom though, that's real work. I hope somebody at least noticed it on the staircase.
You're not wrong, and pastel isn't nonsense here. Wax is worse than most people think. It has to go on warm or it just sits on the surface, and in a cold shop it never sets right, so you end up chasing it with a torch and ruining the coat you just laid. Two days of babysitting a piece of metal. Nobody budgets for babysitting.
The tube you can price. The finish is where the job actually lives.
And yeah. The quote low so you don't feel like a fraud thing. I've been doing this thirty years and I still do it. The ones who don't blink are the ones you should have charged more.