subcontractors

I have to say that up to this point I feel pretty lucky.  As you all know, I have been the general contractor (GC) for this project.  Usually owners hire a GC to find (or do) all the subcontracting work.  The GC has a budget, which had been mutually worked out by the owner and GC, and it's up to them to keep everything together.  I am learning so much, so quickly about building that frequently it makes my head spin.  Luckily, I have family that has helped me in the design and budget phase, (Thanks Tom), family in the construction business (thanks Tim, Russ, Jason, Dave, Steve) that have not only helped in building this house, but have given great advice and gave me questions to ask when I knew nothing.  :)  I am currently looking for bids on vinyl siding- 

I read that for all contract work, (not just siding) I should be looking for 3 or 4 bids to get a feel for the cost. I also surf the web to get retail pricing on materials, although I know that siding isn't JUST siding, it has a lot of extra costs, like under insulation, nails, soffits, etc...  I also like to find out reasonable pricing for labor.  There are many places you can get this kind of information. http://www.siding4u.com/vinyl-siding-cost-calculator.php   for example was a place to get rough estimates on cost of a siding job.

So, I had a budget in place for siding, and went looking.  In the past week I received four bids.  All of them were from (seemingly) repatable companies.

The prices ranged from 8000.00 to 40,000.00 dollars! 

Admittedly the one from Sears, (yeah I know) which was the 40k bid had bunches of incentives, which dropped the price down to 28,000- WITH an additional 750 gift card.... but really?  Almost a four time spread? 

I guess the bottom line is that you need to do your homework, have an idea of what a job should cost and get multipule bids.  It's a jungle out there.


Thanks for reading

Sam