Input for writing your woodworking proposal

Input for writing your woodworking proposal

I’ve been thinking about the kinds of reports and images SketchList provides for writing your woodworking proposals .

But first I want to give you a little bit of background.

At our house this week we are celebrating because fully 11 months after the biggest snowstorm I’ve ever seen the insurance company contractor has finally “finished” his punch list.  The only item  remaining is for his carpenter to build a wall unit bookcase that had to be torn out because of massive amounts of water in the wall behind.  The contractor wanted to know if we had pictures of the bookcase that was being replaced. In this day of your phone holding thousands and thousands of pictures we were sure we had one but of course couldn’t find it.

So the contractor asked me if I could take a few minutes with a pad and pencil and sketch out some ideas of what the bookcase should look like.

Now if you’ve been reading my blog posts for any amount of time at all you know that I developed SketchList 3-D carpentry software for just this purpose. I smiled at the contractor and told him I’d give it a try.

It got me thinking about the process involved in going from idea to proposal to production    Between the ‘design and proposal steps’ and the by and the ‘cut and assembled materials steps’ there are different ideas, concepts, pieces of knowledge about the job that you simply hold in your head. Now that’s fine if you are both the designer and the production person. It’s not so good if you have to convey the idea in some amount of detail to someone else who’s going to do the work. Which is in fact what I have to do with this particular proposal.

It got me thinking about the process going from idea to proposal and how someone in the woodworking business might benefit by using SketchList 3-D to do this. The best way to illustrate this is to put together a document I call – for lack of a better term – input for writing your woodworking proposal.

This document several pages long, contains two 3-D images of the shelving/TV display unit. There’s a it of a half wall underneath the shelf and of course walls to the left and right. You’ll see that in the images. I put together to shop drawings of front and the left you with the dimensions I thought the carpenter will need to layout and build the unit. I included a parts list which shows every part in the job, it’s material, and its size. In addition any part in the job that has some sort of special milling (for example rounding over of a corner or applying a bull nose) is called out in the report.

I included a copy of the purchase list which shows all the materials needed for the job, their quantities, and their total cost. While you might not include the layout diagram – for that matter material cost – in the proposal you give to a prospect, it certainly is important input for writing your woodworking proposal.

If you’d like a copy of a PDF file containing the images and reports simply CLICK TO DOWNLOAD.

If you have any suggestions or questions about this document give me a call or send me an email.

Dave  Rozewski