A leaking tap washer takes fifteen minutes. A dropped door takes twenty. A torn flyscreen takes twenty five. None of them are worth a trade driving across Sydney for, which is exactly why they have all been on the list for eight months.
Most of a small job is not the job
Travel, parking, unloading, working out what the job actually is, loading back up, then the drive to the next one. On a twenty minute repair the work is the smallest part of the visit. That is not a markup, it is arithmetic, and it is why every trade has a minimum.
That is the whole argument for putting several jobs on one visit, whether the list is plastering, tiling or all of it.
Put six twenty minute jobs on one visit and the travel and setup happen once instead of six times. The jobs cost roughly what they should, because the overhead has been spread across all of them.
One visit with eight jobs on it is not eight times the price of one job. It is nowhere near it.
Walk the house once and do not filter
Phone in hand, a note open, one lap. Write down everything that annoys you, including the things you stopped noticing years ago. Most people find fifteen items and are surprised by about six of them.
- Every door: does it close and latch on the first push?
- Every window: does it open and lock?
- Every screen: any holes, any frames pulling apart?
- Every wet area: silicone black, grout missing, anything loose?
- Skirting, architraves and cornice: anything come away?
- Holes in walls from hooks, handles and furniture.
- Outside: gate latching, paths safe, anything rotten, anything green.
- The thing in the garage you have been meaning to have built.
Two photos per item beats a paragraph
One close on the problem, one wide enough to show where it sits. Daylight, and no flash if you can help it. If scale matters, put something ordinary in the frame like a tape or a phone.
A close up of a broken thing with nothing around it is genuinely hard to price. The same thing with the doorway and the floor in shot answers three questions at once.
Repair or replace is your call, so say which
It changes the price. "Fix the screen door" could mean new mesh in the existing frame or a whole new frame. Say which you want, or say you do not know and want both prices. Either is fine. What is not useful is a list of nouns with no verbs.
Priced item by item, done in one day
We price the list as a single visit, line by line, so you can see what each thing costs and cut anything you decide against. Then it gets done in a day, and the offcuts and the packaging leave with us instead of filling your bin.
Which ones will not stay small
Plenty of small jobs stay small. A picture hook hole will still be a picture hook hole in a year. Others will not. Failed silicone lets water behind tile. A gate that does not latch lets a dog out. A soft board in a deck becomes a broken board with somebody standing on it. Those are the ones to pull forward on the list.
