A reader comments: "I have an opportunity to strip and wax about 1,975 square feet of VCT (vinyl composite tile) at a church. Can you recommend the best way to bid this job and do the work?"

We will try to cover this in four stages to minimize confusion. My primary concern is that you are going to have to re-perform the work based our discussion. You indicated that you have access to a 15" swing machine that is 175 RPM. You do not have a wet vacuum system and you are trying to use the same mops for stripping, rinsing and recoating. You are buying your chemicals from a big box store that cannot provide any real guidance. We will look at bidding this opportunity first and proceed to processes later.

Bidding this opportunity is relatively straight forward. First, what is your BLR (burdened labor rate), which is wages plus any overhead such as liability insurance, workers compensation, etc. Since you consider yourself to be "free labor" on this job, you need to pretend that you are in the hospital (or otherwise incapacitated) and have to hire someone to perform this task.

We determined that you would pay them $15.00 per hour and with overhead determined that $20.00 per hour would work. We then determined that it would take approximately six hours for one person to strip and rinse the floor. We then determined that it would take another two hours to apply floor finish. Of course, we cannot account for the drying time when no work is being performed even though the worker is still on the job. Simply multiply the eight total hours times the $20.00 burdened labor rate to arrive at your labor cost.

We will capture your chemical and supply costs in a future article.

Your comments and questions are important. I hope to hear from you soon. Until then, keep it clean...

Mickey Crowe has been involved in the industry for over 35 years. He is a trainer, speaker and consultant. You can reach Mickey at 678-314-2171 or CTCG50@comcast.net.


posted on 7/1/2015