andy thomas

Has anyone in Oz had an outdoor timber decking built recently? Can you remember how much you were charged per square meter? Just rang one of the bigger companies today and was quoted $300/sq meter for Mabou hardwood decking supplied and fitted. Is this the going rate or are they taking the mick?

Would welcome your comments as I am a carpenter and if $300/sqm is normal price in Oz think I might just get into doing Decking. Sure I could do it for less and still make a few bucks.

Cheers, Andy

MrsDagboy

We are getting a deck put on the back of the house, I had a guy that we know around to have a bit of a look & to give us a rough idea if what we want to do is feasable & to give us an idea of cost & he said to work on about $1000/sqm. Mind you, that includes the decking, reroofing the back part of the house & changing the roof line & doing something about our hovel that is a kitchen .

To me $300/sqm sounds damn cheap, want to come do mine? .

andy thomas

Hello again Mrs Dagboy, bet you dont remember replying to my very first post when I was back in the UK. Anyway, the $300/sqm was just for the decking at ground level, nothing fancy and no roof or covering, bog standard covering for 7x4m was another $5000, thats on top of the ballpark figure of $9000-$9500 for the deck. Yours does sound a bit more complicated, is he charging you $1000/sqm for the decking and then for the other or is it all combined?

Andy

MrsDagboy

Hi Andy, no I didnt remember, so I had to go look it up, I was a bit worried I had been nasty to you or something for you to remember it so well . Glad to see it was a question about soccer ...ahem - football .

The price was just a rough guide for everything, so roofline changed, deck, ripping out walls etc, so basically a renovation. Also, ours is a queenslander so the deck is around 3 metres off the ground. Quite a bit different from yours judging by your description .

Sorry I cant be more help, but perhaps somone else may have more info .

andy thomas

No worries, thanks.

Siren & Brian

If your a carpenter why dont you just do it yourself?? Of course it will be cheaper.

andy thomas

That's the whole point, if people are being charged so much I am going to get into it, sorry should have been more clear, I got the quote for an idea of charges and was suprised at the mark up, thats why Im checking out what other people have been charged. We are in rented so dont really want a decking built, it was just to gauge the cost of getting someone to do it to see if it was a profitable venture as decking is so popular. I could easily beat their price but need to know what is a fair price. Not interested in ripping people off.

Andy,

steve99

Hi Andy,

We had a decked area installed about 4 months ago, I had 3 or 4 companies round to quote, prices were fairly similar (apart from one who didnt have a clue, his dimensions were completely wrong...)
I ended up going with probably the largest and (most well known in the area) of the companies, the guy I dealt with was excellent, they werent the cheapest.

We ended up using a wood called Kapur (think thats right) it was cheaper than Jarrah was still fairly hard and once stained looked great, a few board have had slight splits, which they came back and replaced for us. other than that its was excellent.

Im not totally sure what the final dimensions are as its not a regular shape it comes out of a right angled corner off the back left of our boundary and then curves out and round to join the outer edges of the right angle up, the two straight sides of the deck are about 8M long and 6M long, the curved line is approx 3ft off the ground level so this face is also decked, and steps lead up to the actual deck top (I hope that makes some sense ) All the wood under the deck is that treated pine (Is it H1 or H2, something like that anyway)

I reckon the total surface area of deck is somewhere around 40sqm
We paid about $4800 for this so that works out at $120/sqm.
There was quite a lot of labour involved as it was a pretty big deck, plus it had quite a lot of cutting to fit round a slide and rose bushed area that were sunk into the deck, plus the main curve round the front.

I hope this helps, I'll try and dig out a photo if you want some idea of what im babbling on about!

Regards
Steve

hevs

We had a few quotes a couple of months ago for 400 square meters of decking coming in at about 5 grand (hardwood)

this quote was to also hand dig out to the required depth around the pool, so quite labour intensive i think.

If you can beat that i'd be interested

hevs

We had a few quotes a couple of months ago for 400 square meters of decking coming in at about 5 grand (hardwood)

this quote was to also hand dig out to the required depth around the pool, so quite labour intensive i think.

If you can do it cheaper, i'd be interested

HUP

Are you sure it was 400 sqm? Seems a little bit on the large side?

andy thomas

Are you sure on the size, that's just a bit less than the size of an olympic size swimming pool, what are the dimensions, how high off the ground and what type of decking boards is that for?

Andy

andy thomas

Cheers Steve, I appreciate you taking the time to type such a detailed post.

Andy

hevs

LOL, i ment 40!

Its for mabou hardwood and to buiilt level with two sides of the pool. It needs to be dug down around the pool by hand, but we have somewhere for the soil. The job is also guaranteed for 7 years. (allegedly!)

Bordy

Were you going to Deck the whole street?