Cost of marshalls yorkstone heritage paving - Will a paving contractor get it cheaper?

[NovicePaver]

I want to lay approx 20 sq metres of Marshalls Yorkstone Heritage Paving and the best price I've been quoted is £27.50 from Travis Perkins.

I was thinking I may be better to hire a contractor for a day to lay the paving assuming he'll be able to negotiate a better price when purchasing the paving. If he got the paving for £5 less per sq metre I'd save a £100 and he'd only cost about £150 for the day with me acting as labourer.

Am I being optimistic about how much cheaper he'll get the paving?

[the manager]

who is travis perkins
who is marshalls :p

[Rolyan]

I might be a bit stupid here, but I'm not sure how you benefit.

If you do it yourself, you will have to do all the mixing, barrowing, laying out, etc. It will cost you £550 plus materials (sand etc).

If you hire a contractor, I presume you will still have to buy all the materials (sand etc) and you will still have to do all the mixing, barrowing as a labourer (I'm not knocking Labourers, most jobs wouldn't get done without them). The contractor will lay the flags, and the total cost would be £600 i.e. £50 more.

So, it's the same amount of work for you, but more money. HOWEVER, I accept that I may be missing the obvious, and if so I apologise. But you can see that if you look at it like the above, it doesn't appear to make sense.

[NovicePaver]

What I meant was that I assume a Paving contractor would know where the paving could be got at a good price and would be able to negotiate a discount which he would then pass on to me.

Probably being optimistically naive!

[Rolyan]

I can see where you are coming from. However, in my limited experience (I've hardly done any flagging, but I've been involved with a lot of contractors on other DIY jobs) they rarely pass on much saving. Any saving on materials is more than offset by the cost of using them. Their real benefit to you is in them doing the work, skilled or otherwise.

Not only that , I've even known it where it costs a lot more from them than you can get it yourself. Not always the case, but certainly not uncommon.

Please note that I have the utmost respect for all contractors, as the professional ones do a great job, whatever the project. I would be interested to see if it works out for you, but I honestly can't see you saving much, if any. However, I hope I'm wrong, 'cos if you get the job you want, and save money as well, then everyones a winner.

Ask the guy, you've nothing to lose (and you'll have the pleasure of proving me wrong!!!!!).

[Tony McC]

You would struggle to get a competent tradesman to be interested in a 20m² project for one day, and you'd be unbelievably naive to think that the trade discount we work our butts off to acquire would be passed on to some bloke offering us one day's work!

I'm fairly certain any of us contractors can get our mitts on Heritage for less than 27.50, and if you make the project a 'supply and fix' job, you should get better overall value for money than a 'labour only' job, but that value might not be solely of the monetary variety.

Also: there's not too many trademen overly keen on having some well-intentioned but cack-handed DIYer under their feet while they're working. Your time might be better spent brewing tea, making bacon butties, and passing around the Gypsy Creams. :p