I totally agree, Jack. You have to get to know someone a bit before you can meaningfully insult them.
So true! LOL.
Jack, people PAY me to do that!
And when you tell them the price, I bet YOUR welcome cools a bit.
Jack, Jack, Jack!
You get them laughing about everything your're pointing out that you are actually faulting. (Having been a bartender is great experience for this.) A short time later, you leave them that way---laughing. The next morning, they will come down for breakfast and re-asses all of that "wonderful-never-been-painted woodwork" and see it as "ancient-varnish-orange trim" with little "samples" of every color the room has ever been painted in 8 decades, in blobs and swipes all along every edge in the whole gd house. Now it HAS TO GO and they can't wait the 72 hours I told them it'd take for me to email the estimate to them.
Of course, until I said something, they'd been living with it for 7 years. Now they want it all gone before they come home from work tomorrow.
They just hope I'm a not a top-dollar guy. When they get the email and find out I'm not. It's mine. I'm pretty M.O.R., $-wise, esp. for what I bring to the table. Frankly, I'm a terrible business guy. I'm the moron that says "yes," to a few small extras for nothing, then the simplest of them will blow up in my face and cost me money.
They will wonder how they ever "saw" anything for what it really was without your keen and deeply experienced assistance.
Wait 3 days, no more no less. They will still remember the laughs and feel even more strongly about what you suggest. That's the day you email (only!) your estimate.
Break out every last screw and 1/2 hour of labor of your estimate and never total it. Tell them it's so they can pick and choose what they might like to do now or put off until later and just add in THOSE things, plus materials at my full discounts.
They will never add it up, because they want to do everything, now that you've made them think everything needs to be done sooner or later. (It does!) The breakouts all sound reasonable (and they are), so they will often, really often, pull the trigger on the whole thing.
As long as I can get an "Oooh," or an "Ahhh" on the first day they see two colored areas together, I'm in like Flynn.
I do get resistance most often when it comes to editing.
"I know your mother hand-painted that dresser for you when you were only 6, but nothing even remotely like it appears in any of the magazine pages of bedrooms you've ripped out to show me, does it?"
