Billable Hours vs. Better Enough

Ever walk around an older city and come across the kind of architectural detail that you know could have only been executed with a near unfathomable investment of time by some one immensely skilled with their hands? I frequently work in homes built during America’s Guilded age, and have seen ceiling panels that in my lowest estimate would have taken 1,000 hours to carve. How much would it cost to do something like that today, assuming you could find a single artisan still in possession of a skill set that can only be the product of a life’s dedication from the time of an early apprenticeship to a master of your particular craft, be it stone, glass, metal, or woodworking? Maybe a dollar meant something so much different in the days of the gold standard that the same figure arrived at to account for a man’s livable wage is an apples to oranges comparison, maybe there were other factors at work that could keep someone to a task without consideration for wages, or perhaps the motivation for the craftsmen was an overwhelming desire to give his imagining form and the rest kind of took care of itself.  While I don’t proclaim to have achieved status as a master craftsmen in the tradition of work that brightens the corners of our harsh, made environment.  I do have reason to ruminate on this question on a thursday morning.  Another one off is on the way out the door and repeat customer is asking for a machine in the same vein and I need to consider what the heck to charge for it.   Introducing a design element that changes the familiar pattern I’ve learned over the years made for some special challenges with this last build,  and there are definitely some things I’d like to improve upon the design to make it a little less finicky to construct, question is whether it is better enough to be worth it and not whether or not it’ll provide me a roof.