Quoted a memorial sculpture by the pound. That was the mistake.
Thirty-five years in and I still priced a job wrong last fall. Memorial piece for a family, granite, their father's hands resting on a book. I quoted by weight because that's how I buy the stone, so it made sense in my head at the time. Fifteen hundred for the material and rough shaping.
Took me six weeks. The hands alone ate three of them. Every pass of the chisel I was thinking about how those were the hands that held their kids, and I couldn't rush it. By the time I'd finished the base and the lettering I'd logged close to two hundred hours.
Two hundred hours for fifteen hundred dollars. Eight bucks an hour and that's before the shop lights were on.
I told the daughter what it should have cost after she picked it up. She didn't care, she was happy with the piece, paid me extra out of nowhere because she said I undersold myself. That somehow made it worse.
I keep a logbook of every job with hours against what I charged. That one's going to sit there for a long time reminding me that I priced labor like it was gravel.
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This hit me hard because I know exactly what that math feels like from the other direction. I paint portraits, and every now and then someone wants a loved one done and I quote them my normal rate without thinking about what it actually costs me to sit with that face for weeks. And then I do it and I'm wrecked by the end, and I've made almost nothing per hour and I'd do it again anyway because the alternative is rushing the one thing in the world that actually can't be rushed.
Two hundred hours on a father's hands. I get it. That book, the weight of it. You can't chisel fast through something like that.
I hope you didn't beat yourself up too bad over the pricing mistake. The family got the version that only happens when someone cares enough to lose money on it. That's not nothing. But man, I feel the tiredness in this post. Take care of yourself.
You're right about that. The quote was never about the hours. I knew what that piece was going to cost me before I started, I just didn't want to charge them for it. Family was hurting enough.
Portraits are harder in a way. With stone you can step back from it, go grind a weld or split a slab to clear your head. A face on a canvas follows you into every break you take. You're sitting with that person the whole time.
I don't know that there's a fix for the math. You either do the work or you don't, and for that kind of piece you do the work. But I've started writing a real number into the contract anyway. Even if I never collect it, I want them to know what they got.