By Thomas Williams, All American Renovations — Elite member of James Hardie™ ALLIANCE
Is What I’m Looking At An Estimate Or A Proposal?
If you’re holding two numbers from two contractors and one of them is a range you got on the phone or on our website, or an Estimate that says Siding – $x, you’re not comparing anything yet.
A proposal vs. estimate, those are two different documents. They get made at different points, from different information, and they mean different things. Here’s how to tell them apart, and what a real one should have on it.
An estimate is a range, and it’s wide on purpose
We give instant estimates here, right on our website.
It’s built before anybody has climbed a ladder, opened a wall, or watched you point at a gable and say what if we did shake up there? How we measure your house with HOVER
So the range is deliberately wide. The bottom of it is bare bones — what your house actually needs. The top is the magazine cover: the big design changes, the upgrades, the stone accent, the version where you knock it out of the park.
That’s not us hedging. It’s that both of those are real versions of your project, and on that first call we don’t know yet which one you want.
We typically don’t go outside that range. When we do, it’s almost always because something happened between the first call and the visit: you started dreaming. Stone on the front. Well, if we’re doing siding and windows, might as well do the roof. That’s not a surprise cost — that’s a bigger project than the one we priced, and you chose it.
If you’re thinking about more than one thing, ask for it broken out by trade
This is the part I’d want a homeowner to know even if they never call us.
When somebody’s weighing siding and windows and a roof, I’ll break the ballpark down by trade, so each piece can stand alone. Not everything has to happen at the same time.
And sometimes I’ll slow the conversation down and talk about sequencing — because the order matters more than people expect.
Replace the siding, then come back next year for windows? Now somebody is tearing off trim that was just installed and redoing it. You paid for that trim twice.
Customers get an order fixed in their head, and often a different order would serve them better. I’d rather tell you that and lose the job than have you call me in eighteen months asking why I didn’t mention it.
A proposal is the real document
A proposal happens after we’ve been to your house, walked it, confirmed the details, and written everything down.
Here’s what should be on one — ours or anybody’s:
Sections by trade. Siding, soffit and fascia, windows, gutters, decking, roofing. Each one its own block with its own subtotal, so you can see what each piece of the project costs on its own.
Materials and labor split apart. Every trade section broken into what the material costs and what the labor costs, as separate line items.
Quantity, unit price and total on every single line. Not “siding — $X.” The actual boards, the trim, the caulk, the nails, the housewrap, the dumpster. With a plain-English description under each one explaining what it is and why it’s there.
Options you can turn on and off. Upgrades with tick boxes — and when you decline one, it stays visible on the page, struck through, with its price still showing. So you can see exactly what you said no to and what it would have cost. Ours update live as you tick them.
Warranty terms written into the line items themselves. Not a vague promise at the bottom. On the line for the siding it should say what the warranty on that specific product is and for how long.
A payment schedule. What’s due when, tied to milestones you can verify — not dates on a calendar. How much should a contractor ask for up front?
If the document in your hand doesn’t have those things, it isn’t a proposal. It’s a number.
How the price can be fixed and still have a contingency in it
This trips people up, so let me explain how it actually works on our jobs.
Fixed price means we don’t change the price because of scope — unless you change the scope. If you add stone after signing, that’s a change. Us discovering the job is harder than we thought is not your problem.
But some things genuinely cannot be known until the siding comes off. What’s under it is the main one.
So the sheathing line on our proposal is priced at worst case — as if every sheet had to be replaced — and it says so right on the page: quantity to be determined upon removal of siding.
If we don’t use all of it, you aren’t charged for all of it. That’s the part that matters. The contingency protects your budget from a surprise; it isn’t a slush fund we get to keep.
When there’s rot behind the sheathing, it goes one of two ways. If we anticipated significant problems going in, it comes out of that contingency. If it’s a genuine surprise, we stop, show you the damage, and put a change order in front of you for approval before we go any further.
What the numbers usually look like: truly unforeseen conditions — the ones that catch everybody off guard — typically run $2,500 to $5,000 in repairs. The significant ones run $8,000 to $15,000, and honestly, there are usually indicators pointing that direction before we start. Experience is mostly knowing what you’re looking at.
That matters because it changes decisions. On a stucco job, the homeowner also wanted soffit, fascia and gutters done. Because we told them up front what we expected to find behind that stucco, they chose to hold those items for later rather than blow through their budget. That’s a better outcome than finding out in week two.
Permit fees, and a warning worth having
You’ll see permit fees on our proposal as a $0.00 line.
That’s not us leaving them out. It’s that the municipality sets the number and we don’t know it until we apply. It gets billed to you at actual cost when it’s incurred.
And the reason it’s on there at all: if a job gets done without a permit and a stop-work order lands, the fine is typically double what the permit would have cost — plus you’re now paying the permit too. If a contractor suggests skipping the permit to save you money, that’s not a discount, it’s a bet with your money.
What happens if the proposal comes in over your budget
We dissect why, together. Then we go through the options for getting back inside it, and you decide what matters most.
Sometimes that’s dropping an upgrade. Sometimes it’s phasing the work across two years. Sometimes it’s doing the thing that actually needs doing and leaving the cosmetic piece for later.
What it isn’t is me quietly thinning the scope so the number looks better. You’d never see it, and you’d find out in year four.
What I’d tell you if you called me
- Find out which document you’re holding. Ask directly: is this an estimate or a proposal?
- Never put a proposal next to a phone estimate and call it a comparison.
- Ask for it broken out by trade if you’re considering more than one thing. Then ask what order they’d do it in, and why.
- Look for the contingency. A proposal with no allowance for what’s behind the siding is a proposal that’s going to grow.
- Ask what happens to unused contingency. The answer tells you a great deal.
Want somebody to read yours with you?
If you’re in Middle Georgia or Metro Atlanta holding a bid you can’t decode, send it over. We run a free Risk Report — we’ll tell you plainly what’s included, what isn’t, and what risk comes with it. If somebody else’s is the better offer, we’ll say so.
We’re in Hampton, with a design center in Forsyth, and we work across Middle Georgia and Metro Atlanta.
All American Renovations · Hampton and Forsyth, Georgia
Thomas Williams is part of the team behind All American Renovations, helping homeowners throughout Middle Georgia and Metro Atlanta make informed decisions about exterior renovations. With hands-on experience in siding, roofing, and home improvement projects, Thomas focuses on helping homeowners understand their options, compare materials, and know what to expect before starting a renovation.
