Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Be Your Own Estimator

I am now announcing a new feature on my website, and I invite you to take a look. My website is: www.onthebeamremodeling.com. Once you arrive at the home page, you will see a new feature: What Will It Cost? If you click on that button, a magic chart will appear! This is the tool that you can use to actually calculate your own remodeling project.

My Budget: "It's a Secret"

The reason that I installed this on my website should be obvious: What are people dying to know? That's right, how much will it cost? I almost always ask inquirers if they have a budget that they would like to share with me, and the response is mostly, "No, I have no idea what it will cost. I just want to hear a price." However, everybody has at least one or two numbers in the back of their mind, that 'secret' amount of money that they don't want to exceed. And so often the reality of what building costs are collides with many homeowners' 'secret' cost.

Step-By-Step Process

The What Will It Cost chart will guide you step-by-step through your remodel, including most details that are required. I test ran it on a few guinea pigs to make sure that people not in the building industry could do it: Thank you, Chris, Bonnie, Peggy and Melissa! However, if you run into any difficulties, please just pick up the phone and give me a call. I will answer your questions and if I can't, I'll refer you over to Steve Schliff, who is the estimator of the company.

Keep in mind that these are going to be fairly rough estimates of your project. However, they will give you a realistic starting point.

My great appreciation goes out to the people that were involved in this project:
John McLean, a San Francisco Architect who devised the chart; Allen Romano, who cleverly recreated it from a magazine article to a virtual chart on the computer; and Tod Abbott, my website editor who got it up and running on the website.

2 comments:

Marti said...

That is a great tool for folks like us who wonder where the ballpark even is before calling a contractor.

CherLiquori said...

Wow, Lisa! That's quite an awesome tool for people to use. It clearly demonstrates your expertise and knowledge given all the choices people have.

If I may suggest, and I know this would be extra work, maybe include a link to a glossary page so it's easier to know what the selections mean. I went thru it with our deck in mind, but wasn't sure which choices to highlight sometimes. Otherwise, it's a good tool for your readers to interact with.

I'd also recommend making the URL for your website (in the first paragraph) a hot link so readers of the post can click directly to your site and check out the tool.