We get a lot of estimate requests that we can’t even bid. Sometimes the scope doesn’t match our services. Sometimes the price doesn’t match the budget. All in all, the customer needs work that they simply can’t afford. That’s the plain truth.
I recently looked at a property in Ballard where a multigenerational family had lived for years. The new wife wanted to reclaim the yard after decades of neglect. But the backyard had bamboo, blackberries, weeds, broken fencing, concrete, and piles of old junk. Pesticides had been used there before, too. Everything was a mess.
She asked me, “How much would it cost to clean this up?”
That’s a loaded question. They could spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars just removing junk before we could even start on the landscaping. There was no simple, low cost fix. Even a middle cost approach would still be expensive. Any real solution would take a lot of labor, hauling, and time.
And just because a solution exists doesn’t mean it can be quoted, built, and paid for.
That’s one of the difficult parts of this job. When we first meet a customer, we don’t always know exactly what they want, what the work will cost, or what they’re able to hire us to do. We’re a small business. We have real wages, a real crew, dump fees, insurance, and the basic costs of staying in business. We have to account for all of that when we take on a job. Otherwise, why take it on?
With a yard like this, a small cleanup might show some progress, but it wouldn’t solve the larger problem. Cut the weeds and they grow back. Trim the overgrowth and it returns. I don’t want someone spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a band-aid if they expect us to leave them with a finished yard. We can’t stand behind that expectation.
It isn’t that we can’t do the work or don’t want to help. We can do it, but we have to charge what it takes to get it done. If that’s beyond the customer’s budget, we have to be honest about the mismatch.
My recommendation would be to break the property into stages. Focus on the front yard one season, the side yard the next, and the backyard after that. It could be a three-year project. They could also do some of the work themselves and hire a contractor for the parts they can’t handle. Clear a little, get better tools, learn what’s under the overgrowth, and keep going.
Of course, doing it yourself takes time and energy. That’s why people call us in the first place. But when the full project is out of reach, there may be no contractor quote that fits the budget. The best path is to start where they can, pay for help where it counts, and keep working at it over time.
Sometimes that’s the honest answer: the yard can be reclaimed, but it can’t all be done at once for the money available.
