# Forum Contacts & Links Estimating & Quoting  Garage rebuild on a slope

## GarageBuild

Hello everyone, 
I've had a devil of a time even getting a quote. Builders come, look and promise a quote then vanish. 
It's not a big juicy job like a whole house KDR 
It's a small job: just a garage to be demolished and rebuilt, excavating out the foundation space beneath to create a useful storage room below. 
But it's hard: on a slope. A sandy soil that requires good underpinning (it flows like water. Old sand hills). On a road that gets bus traffic to cause vibrations. and whether or not to save the sandstone foundations? 
A hard but small job = no takers. 
So if I can find someone how much do you experts out there think this job should cost? 
1) the garage  is one level at the road, but the hill drops down so it's 2 levels from behind. 
2) the garage has been demolished down to the concrete slab already 
3) Slab has to be bashed in (it's rotten and can't be used) - got a guy who will do this for $8k but he's demo only. 
4) Underneath the slab is a void - ground level at the street, dropping at a 45 degree angle down to a metre above ground level behind. The void is enclosed by the sandstone foundations of the garage. To the rear is a door-sized hole cut by a dodgy builder for the purpose of access, and now propped up by acroprops. Dodgy builder ordered a too-small lintel for the top so the sandstone blocks on top are now out of kilter. 
The void has old building rubbish from the garage construction (no asbestos, only brick and timber) and sandstone rubble 
5) this void needs to be excavated out and underpinned to prevent the hill collapsing and to prop up the footpath and road. 
6) - prefer to keep the sandstone foundations on account that it might be more expensive to remove them. But if cheaper to remove then they can go 
7) - builder needs to ensure the foundations are sound, the hill is retained safely, the horizontal loads are dealt with.  
8) lay a slab on the ground level 
9) cut the door hole to the right dimensions and install the door (already have a door and jams) 
10) lay a new suspension slab as the roof of the storage room and floor of the garage above 
11) rebuild the garage above: not fussy. Brick or whatever product is sturdy and cheap. 
12) colorbond roof the garage, reinstate the power to both room below and garage above (got plenty of lights) 
The end. 
I have so far found nobody willing to touch it or even to quote. One guy brought his engineer out for which i paid $250 for site inspection and then didn't even come up with a quote. 
Another guy I had to pay $350 to send out his engineer for site inspection then he produced a wild quote of $400k which included making a granny flat out of the room below, which I don't need and don't want. Just put in the concrete floor I only need an access and storage space, as cheap as possible but structurally sound and sturdy. 
anybody got any ideas? It's been 3 years and i'm just out of ideas.

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## Pulse

photos and suburb might help. Maybe you need to wait until work is scarce or owner build with subbies, give it a go, I'd love to build that if it was my house  
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## GarageBuild

Thanks a lot for your reply. I am hesitant to give suburb just on account that I want to know how much it should cost wherever you live. In Sydney, tradies will give a higher estimate for a suburb they think is wealthy and a lower one for an area they think isn't. But that has nothing to do with the actual work cost !  Plus, sometimes poor people live in rich areas and richer ones in poor areas it just depends on their life circumstances.

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