New home owner who has never had to hire a contractor before. Want to have chain link fence replaced and want to have put in white vinyl fence to match connected town home.

It is just a 40 foot length I need replaced and will need to have one gate. As I get quotes, what kind of price should I expect to pay? What’s considered fair and what’s considered a rip off?

EDIT: Thanks for all the feedback! I think I’m not in the right tax bracket to hire people to do this, so probably going to try to do it myself.

  • DerArzt@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 month ago

    Renting the machine also would be good for your back. Folks can underestimate how hard digging narrow holes in the ground can be.

    • Treczoks@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 month ago

      I second that. I wanted to remove loam in the front garden (here it is 5cm top soil and then hard loam down to the center of the earth, it seems), so I could mix in sand and other stuff in order to actually get something growing there.

      I started by shoveling two 90l buckets by hand, and wanted to go to the landfill with them. But up the road was a construction site. I stopped and asked, and they were happy to take my stuff - for free. I went back home and refilled the buckets, and returned to the construction site to dump them again. My back already was quite unhappy about that day, as the clay is rock hard and heavy up here.

      There I saw them riding a front loader, and I asked them if they could drop by and just take a load or two with that. And they did. With just two runs they took out more than I could have done with a dozen runs on my own. They really saved my day, and my back. And it only cost me a case of beer.