September 25, 2010.

The last few posts have been about fun stuff. Working with the girls in bathing suits, buying a copious amount of liquor, that sort of thing. Let’s get rid of the fun and talk about money for a minute.

Now that the dust has settled, let’s talk about the price of the hard dodger and bimini. Before I started I guesstimated the price at about the $2000 mark. I was wrong. I can tell the time of day by looking at a tree frog and the state of the tide but I wasn’t even close when pondering the price of the “project’.

All things tallied up and the final price for the dodger and bimini was $3992.00. That’s right, almost $4000 dollars. That’s what I thought too when I added everything up, you gotta be freaking kidding me. So let me break it down a bit.

First I built a 4 foot by 8 foot table to assemble the dodger on. So including the wood for that, the dodger and the bimini, the lumber total was just under $300 bucks. Not too bad.

The windows themselves were a bit more than I envisioned. The glass came in at $420. The “h” channel for the frame was $162 and the special goo to seal everything added another $16. This bloated the price of the 6 windows to $630. The windows came out spectacularly so at $105 per window it was a bargain.

The paint was a lot more than I had anticipated. I used a gallon of barrier coat to waterproof everything. Then there was a quart of special Alwgrip primer and then the Alwgrip paint itself. Then of course, they both need their own individual thinners. I also used a gallon of Durabak non skid paint of the top of the bimini. Grand total, $410.

I had to modify the existing enclosure sides to be able to attach it to the new dodger and bimini. So between Sailrite and West Marine that ran us just over $200 bucks for hardware and such. It’s the incidentals that get you.

The biggest expense was the fiberglass and associated crap. Fiberglass mat, 7 gallons of resin, brushes, rollers, mixing cups and so forth ended up costing us about $1100. Ouch. We could have saved a bit of money if we had realized just how much resin we were gonna need. If we had bought the resin in a 5 gallon pail rather than by the gallon we could have saved another $150. It always seemed like 1 more gallon would do it. I had no idea we had gone through 7 gallons until I was adding up the receipts at the jobs completion.

Finally, the last big expenses were the accessories. I had to cut 2 gaping holes in our cockpit coaming to be able to thru bolt the dodger in place. I solved the problem of hiding these holes by installing a glove box compartment in either side of the cockpit. They were over $100 apiece. Then we decided to add 2 hatches to the roof of the dodger to vent fresh air into the enclosure. Each hatch was over $200. The there was the built in 12 volt fan, the light fixture and the associated wiring. Totaled up, the accessories cost us $866.

The labor. We started the job at the end of June and finished up in mid September. We used our weekends and I did a bit before and after work whenever possible. We logged 166 hours from start to finish. That’s counting building the assembly table all the way through installing the last snap attaching the enclosure to the bimini.

When all is said and done, the job cost more money than we had figured. The job also took a lot longer than we had guessed it would, but I gotta say…..I think it came out even better than I had hoped.