I am a professional flooring installer. There are quite a few different costs that are associated in installing a new hardwood floor in a (not new) home. If your home doesn't have an existing floor, then the average install was mentioned in the above comment. Those numbers hold true in St. Louis, Missouri. $2 - $3 for Nail Down Lets look at the job from start to finish. Make sure to get a moisture test, try and understand the reason behind this. You must allow your wood floor to acclimate to your home, and the moisture levels should be within the tolerances allowed. If you nail all your wood down while its freezing in your house, then you allow your home to remain open, during 100 degree days with 100% humidty like it gets here, you will have issues. Let your wood sit in your home, at your normal temps, for a couple days. A week if you can. If you have tear up. This is where the cost can vary greatly. If your home is on wood, you can look in the hear/ac register on the floor and check what all is installed on top of your sub floor. Here is a general list I use for take up: Carpet $.20 / sq ft Vinyl $1.00 / sq ft (If you have more than one layer, usually you can take all up at once, cut with hand saw into smaller easier to pry up pieces. Set your saw to not cut through your subfloor. Buy the 4ft pry bar for $20 at the box stores) Nail Down HardWood $1.50-$2.50 / sq ft. (The thinner the boards, the more expensive. i.e. 5 inch 3/4 is easier to rip up than 2" 1/4 (3/4 inch wood). More boards = more nails ) Laminate $1.00 / sq ft. This is the easiest take up. You will have to have a place to dump it, but if you have old laminate, you should really consider taking it up yourself. Its simple Ceramic $2-$4 / sq ft Nobody wants to tear out old ceramic. If the underlayment is screwed down and glued, well it can get expensive, dusty, and down right dangerous. Wear safety googles. BUT WAIT!! There is more! If there is a toilet, that can cost up to $100 to be pulled up, and reinstalled correctly. There is the issues with the baseboards. Usually this is pulled and rehung for free. Its a great opportunity to have it replaced, it gets banged up pretty bad if the last time it was hung, it was hung up with a million nails. The key is to use a utility knife and cut the top of the base, cutting the calk/base from the paint, so when you pull the base, it doesn't rip the paint up the wall. If your floor was taller before, you will have an issue with your base matching the old paint line. You can buy taller base, or paint!! I use this calculator to plug in all the values of the take up and installation costs, it gives me a rough estimate. This is android only, I haven't found one I like for apple sorry! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dma.flooringcalculator For installation charges i use this a guide: (All amounts are Per Square Foot) NailDown Hardwood $2-$3 (depending on width of board) Carpet $.50 (pattern matches/berbers extra $.25-$1.00 Depending) Laminate $2 (Cheaper for larger open areas) Vinyl $1 I hope the info helps!! D

I hate the calls I get to drill an additional hole in an installed countertop. You just can’t charge enough. Hey, it’s just a little hole and will only take a few minutes, right? I get most of my work from Internet advertising. Sure, I get some word-of-mouth work, but the repair business by its very nature doesn’t lend itself to that model very often. So I’m paying to have our initial telephone conversation, but being in business, I can’t pay for anything. You have to. Furthermore, you also have to pay for the previous three potential customers that I spoke with that thought $150.00 was too much. I’m not paying it. Okay, I am, but you’re reimbursing me. Each call costs me about $8.00, so you’re $32.00 into me and I haven’t even gotten out of my Laz-E-Boy. Let’s assume you’re an average customer and you’re 45 minutes away. At 15 miles per gallon, insurance, maintenance, etcetera, let’s call it twenty bucks. That bit from Lowe’s when you tried to do this yourself didn’t work so hot, did it? Well the one I’m bringing with the industrial diamonds won’t suffer that problem, however, that bit costs me $90.00 with shipping and it’ll probably drill 200 holes dry before replacement. The decade-old Metabo driving the bit is paid off, but just needed a rebuild last month at $150.00. So with the advertising, vehicle, time, and equipment, I’m at least $120.00 into your job and so far nothing has happened for which I can bill a penny. Before I spend the four minutes it takes to drill the hole, let’s think about what you’re really asking me to do. You’re asking me to bet $2,500.00, the cost of a replacement top should I screw this up, in exchange for the opportunity to gross $30.00 profit. ($150.00-$120.00 = $30.00) Oops. Wait a minute. I’ve still got to drive back and you’ve got to pay for that. Make that $150.00 - $187.50 = ($37.50). So you’re asking me to bet $2,500.00 for the opportunity to lose forty bucks. If you want this hole drilled at $150.00, you’re going to have to wait until I schedule a job very close to you, or pay my minimum charge, $270.00. Before this hole can be drilled, some things need to happen to lower my risk from its insane height. First, and call me a sexist ‘cause I am, the woman of the house dictates hole placement. If I show up and there is a guy pointing to where he thinks it may go, I’m outta there, no charge. I will place a piece of tape where she’s told me the hole goes and I will photograph her finger pointing to it. That’s after I’ve confirmed that a hole in that location won’t take out a mechanical sink fastener. Can I move a mechanical sink fastener? Sure, but your $150.00 job just left with the fastener. I’m not only betting the cost of a replacement countertop, I’m giving you the opportunity to tell the world, via the Internet, as to how I’ve performed. At $150.00, you get as equal a say as a person who hires me to build a $150,000.00 addition. As a member of www.homeadvisor, my customers get to rate me from 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent). I got a 4.83 rating once instead of a 5 because the homeowner’s plumber told me he’d clean under the sink then didn’t do so after I’d drilled the hole. I respect the guy’s time by not throwing him out of the sink cabinet for a few minutes and a less-than-perfect review is my reward. If you’re calling me, it’s probably because the guys who fabricated and installed your stone are out of business. Don’t feel badly, it happens. A lot. Unlike me, these guys never knew their costs of doing business and the marketplace extracts a severe price for ignorance. If your stone fabricator is responsive, he may as well drill the hole for nothing. It’s better to have a customer raving about how great you are than have them tell their neighbor how you overcharged them for drilling a simple faucet hole after you paid them seven grand several years ago. He’ll be sending his best guy too, not 9-dollar-an-hour Jimmy. He’s already losing money, so he may as well lower his risk and boost his reputation as much as possible.

Zone systems (zone boards specifically) are designed electrically to have proper sized transformer. Again with the VA rating? Yes, this isn't voodoo magic. If the electrical loads (24v) are not properly sized to the transformer you will have erratic system behavior. For that reason, I would NEVER choose the Nest for those kinds of applications. The odds are low that it will work and / or for very long. Heavy system loads. These loads change thru out the season. If you want something to work, shouldn't it just work any time rather than sometimes? It's one thing to get a system to work in 80 degree weather, it's quite another to keep it working under a 95-100 degree heat wave. This comment is primarily directed at a HVAC zone system. (in case others without a zone system read this thread) I haven't had any issues with Ecobee, but I don't see this kind of T-stat all that often because Ecobee is primarily designed for use in commercial type applications. I am a Texas licensed HVAC contractor and service the Katy, Texas area. TACLB28416E

I just went through a situation last year where the flooring retailer (not a BB store, btw) sent a person out to measure, and then grossly oversold me on the square footage of the material as well as the installation (priced by the sq. ft based on the sq ft of material). Plus they then "lost" the excess carpet that I had paid for. For your installer to charge based on the actual square footage sold to you by Lowes, with the same 10% cushion already built in, makes sense. For them to be doing their own measurements and padding them, and then doing an additional 10% for labor when it is labor that you are hiring them separately for from the get-go makes no sense; and sounds like he is trying to squeeze you. You could ask Lowe's for a referral to someone else. How much extra $ are we talking about here?