I hate to break the news to you early, but there is no easy way to estimate re-framing costs on rehab projects. Re-framing could be anything from just installing a beam, to a completely new layout throughout the home. For new construction you can estimate costs simply by square footage of the project, but doing this in rehabbing is very inaccurate and can result in underestimating projects by thousands of dollars. Our job as Project Managers is to find efficient yet dependable methods for estimating rehab costs, so if we can not estimate re-framing by square footage what can we do?

I asked myself this question for years as a Project Manager, especially since much of my career has been on large rehabs with significant layout changes. Over time I could estimate costs more accurately simply by understanding the extent of the work. However, a good method never clicked until I became a Contractor myself. We ran a highly skilled framing crew for a couple years, and when we gave clients pricing, we based our costs based on the amount of days we expected to be working on the job. 

That is when it clicked, we estimate almost every other trade the same way that we expect contractors to bid. For example, we estimate siding by squares and the contractor will bid per square, or we estimate hardwood by square foot because the contractor will bid per square foot. Only in rare circumstances do we not follow this pattern, so it only makes sense for us to estimate framing costs the same way that the contractor will bid, by day (or by hour). 

Now of course this only applies to labor, so I am going to let you in on another trick. After running a framing carpentry crew and a finish carpentry crew for years, I learned another pattern. Labor and material costs are very similar in pricing for all carpentry jobs, so you can simply match the material cost to what you estimated for labor. You may be thinking that this can’t be perfectly accurate… and you are right. There could be a delta of up to a couple thousand dollars between the material and labor costs. But remember, we are not here to be perfectly accurate, we are here to be efficient and run a budget that does not get blown. This is why the final step is so important. 

Always add a 10-20% contingency cost addition to your framing line item, when your project requires re-framing. It needs to be accepted and understood that this is the most difficult line item to estimate, therefore we need to pad our numbers to account for this uncertainty. 

The final question to address here is, how do I estimate the amount of days needed to complete a re-framing job? Unfortunately this still takes experience, but it is surprisingly easy to equate different scopes of work to a certain number of days; especially as you get more experience with your contractor.

• LVL’s and small layout changes take about 1-2 days
• Significant re-framing where up to half of the layout will change can take 2-4 days
• Dramatic re-framing where you will have an all new layout can take 4-7 days
• Ground-up, pop-top, and dormer additions will take 5-10+ days

These are the numbers that we are seeing, and for you to start with;

• Re-framing (L): $500 - $1,000 / day

• Re-framing (L&M): $1,000 - $2,000 / day

Hopefully this can help you estimate re-framing costs more accurately because there is no doubt in my mind that this is the most difficult line item for rehabbers to estimate.

Let us know if you have any other ways that you prefer to estimate, or if you have any questions about this method.

Keep building,

Brandon