This is one of my long educational posts for newbies and veterans - mainly about how ignoring little things when you’re quoting, can bite you in the rear, with a little bad luck thrown in just to stomp on you when you’re down, lol.
Story begins with a request for a routine fence cleaning and stain. Two year old rough sawn pine fence that had been sealed with just plain Thompson’s water seal. Home about 30 minutes away, a few miles short of my northern limits, pretty area that’s right at base of mountains, so can be a little breezy at times, but an area I’m in a lot, with a lot of newer homes and about 75% of them have fences. So I go look at, nothing jumps out at me, and being a little cocky with wood cleaning, spent most my time chatting with owner and convincing him to go with a stain that at least had some color to it, though they wanted something with natural look to it. 230 l/f of fence, 2 of the sides had another owners fence that backed up to it about 1’ apart, so counting the 2- 10’ fronts and the one side that was open to another neighbor he wanted done, total was right at 330 linear feet times 6 feet high
Only concern I really payed attention to were a couple of panels where the guys wife had tried to clean with their pw, and had left some areas that would need to be blended in.
Pre-clean pics:
So far no problems. Send my quote $700 for cleaning and $400 for the stain, estimating we’d use about 12-13 gal of stain based on 2 coats of ReadySeal. Price does not include stain - I never include stain with my quote, keeps it simpler for me and that way if there’s extra or whatever, they can carry back or keep and also there’s never the concern on their part about what you’re using, whether you’re diluting, etc. So they accept quote and go buy 12 gallon of ReadySeal natural cedar.
So following week, supposed to be great weather all week. I schedule and go Monday to clean, thinking I can go back Thursday to stain, before I left town for beach on Sat for 5-6 days. Cleaning went fine. Used my standard hw mix, rinsed at about 700psi except where I had to blend in owners wand marks, and using my Ryobi, hit with oxalic and rinsed. Got all the hardware vasolined prior to cleaning. Took about 4.5 hours and remember drive #2 one hour round trip, so probably should have been about $100 higher on cleaning, but fence turned out well and I’m happy and client real happy with results.
Mistake #2 - normally I break it down where I get paid for cleaning when done and then the staining when done. Learned my lesson the hard way one winter on a large project when I had to wait 5 weeks to stain because of weather. But because weather was suppose to be beautiful all week, wasn’t a large project, and I was coming back in a few days didn’t do it, said just wait. Leave client my moisture gauge and tell him to check it Wednesday.
Pics Cleaned and dried - pay attention
So here comes stain day. Beautiful weather predicted all day, high 70’s, slight breeze, maybe 5mph, but workable. Of course, out of my $400 for staining, had to buy another roll of rosin paper, pack of pins and a new large stain brush, since we were going to have to cut in some around pool pump and the 2 gate areas. About $60.
So we get there, get everything taped off, rosin paper put down and ready to go, when I remembered I needed to take off the little caps and a couple of lights on top of all the 4*4 posts, otherwise there’d be a small line unstained at bottom edge. Mistake #3 - Most people just stick up there or use a dab of glue. Not these, these boys are screwed on with 3" screws. So have to borrow owners ladder and unscrew all of them. 30-40 min lost.
So I start spraying using my 2gpm 12v. Helper cutting in tops and underneath top band board. We’re rocking. Started on the back because it was the driest and also the hardest because it’s sitting on pretty steep little hill. By the time I finish the back and one section of the side, we’re breaking out the 2nd 5 gallons and we’ve still got a second coat to do. The wood is literally soaking this stuff up like a sponge. I’m like WTH is going on. And then it hits me. Mistake #4 - Though the posts and top rails are treated, the fence is truly just plain old rough sawn pine, not pressure treated. Have never seen this on a pretty nice house and fence, so never occurred to me. Realize that I’ve touched every one of these boards 3-4 times between cleaning and rinsing but never crossed my mind because often, even treated sometimes will not show much of the pt green when exposed to direct sun for a couple of years, but there will usually be some somewhere. Not this time and I just hadn’t noticed. So I go tell the owner, who fortunately works from home, that we need at least another 10 gal of stain and that’s going to be tight. Luckily HD had the color in stock so he’s back within an hour with the additional stain, though about $400+ poorer.
Continuing on we’re still doing pretty good time wise until we start cutting in gate. Notice on pics above, the gates on both sides have these little plexiglass bubbles for the dog to look out. Pretty cool actually. On the outside, they have a black trim piece around, so I had told my helper to just vasoline them and we’d just cut in. Mistake #5 - Well on the backside, no trim piece, just clear plexiglass, so unless we took off, there would be about a 1.5" unstained ring around on the inside. And of course it had some weird screws in there, so another 30 min lost taking off both of those. So about 1:30 now, we’ve been there 4 hours but just about done with left side, few sections to do second coat on, backside all done, paint supply looking ok, figure another 2 hours we’ll be packing up.
Meanwhile, just a few small random clouds drifting around and breeze picking up just a little. We finish up left side in about 10min, come around towards back of house to go finish right side and coming down out of the mountains it looks like a tornado. Seriously, like something you see in the movies. And it’s coming fast. Look at weather radar, it’s not showing crap except for up in the mountains 50 miles away. Forecast still perfect, lol. Literally in less than 5 min it hit. 50-60mph winds and rain blowing sideways. We couldn’t even make it to the truck, made it to owners front porch and they felt sorry for us and brought towels. Had about 1.5" of rain in about 15min. Just one of those rare micro-bursts that happen. 5 miles either side of us didn’t get a drop. I had a large heavy duty piece of cardboard that was refrigerator packing with a bucket with a couple of gal bottle sitting in it on the trailer and we found the cardboard over a quarter mile away. So we obviously had to pack up everything and call it a day. Love packing when everything a soaking mess and of course all our tarps, rosin paper and where we’d taped off house was a mess. Told owner we’d be back in a week after beach. they were cool.
Eight days later, the following Friday, back from beach, with Hurricane Ian tracking behind us. Pretty but windy as heck. go back, but too windy to use any kind of sprayer, so just ended up painting gates and top posts and rails and cutting in around pump. Using brush and roller we were using crazy amounts of stain. Did get doggie windows vasoline off and put back on and with all the caps and lights. Spent about another 3 hours total there, round trip #3. Following week, little rain from storm over weekend and windy as crap on Monday so no go. Tuesday, nice, dry, little breezy so go with pump up sprayers, since shoots little bigger droplets and not so prone to blowing with wind as bad. So got the rest sprayed and ended up back brushing. Out of 22 gallons bought, we used 21.5.
Oh, to top it off, while I was gone, owner texted me pics of back windows of sunroom which had fair amount of overspray. Happened the first day when I was spraying upwards against rear fence. I know I was covered that day too. So had to bring wash truck and wash rear windows, so make that Round trip #4 and 5. Spent about another 3 hours there the last time. So all together on the staining, had $60 worth of supplies, at least that much on truck fuel, 15 hours of labor for helper counting travel time, so another $250 there. Add it all up and I made a sweet $30, maybe. LOL Typically I charge on staining about what the cost of the stain is, so roughly $35-40 per gal. By not recognizing the wood I was dealing with, I obviously way under quoted. The fluke storm probably cost me at least a few hundred dollars because we really would have been done in another 2-3 hours if weather would have held on that first day.
Looking back on it, kind of humorous and a good smack up side my head to focus when I’m out doing a quote and a good reminder to look for anything quirky. Just removing and re-installing the caps and doggie window probably close to 2 hours. Worked out to 95 sq ft per gal on the ReadySeal. Typically with treated their 150s/f pretty good estimate.
The good news is the fence turned out beautiful. Already had pics of it posted in the neighborhood FB page. And I did pick up a hw across the street. So although not profitable a job well done. Sometimes that’s all the reward you get.
After pics a week later -
