The Window in the Wrong Wall

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town the pleasantest enquiry was the one that had been thought out for you already. A customer who knows exactly what she wants saves you an afternoon, and chooses the ground you will be beaten on.

Two jobbing builders in the old town, the same stock bricks and the same slaked lime.
Both were handed the same half sheet of paper with four items written on it.
Both measured the same back kitchen and both reckoned the same nineteen pounds.
One sent his figure for the four items on the Friday.
One sent his figure for the four items, and a second figure beside it.
Same trade, same nineteen pounds, the same four items. What had the second man priced?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two jobbing builders in the town I've never named, each with a handcart, a boy and a yard of sand going green. In the October both were asked to the same house, on separate days, to look at the back kitchen.

The householder met each of them with a half sheet of paper in her hand, and on it, in a hand that was not hers, four items. A new window in the back wall. The doorway widened. The walls lime-washed afresh. The copper reset. A man had come to look at the room two winters since, told her what it wanted and gone away without ever sending a figure, and she had kept his four lines in the dresser drawer like a prescription. The room was ten feet by twelve, brick floor, a copper in the corner that smoked, and in January, she said, she did everything in the front room.

The first builder read the four items, measured the window opening and looked at the copper. His estimate came on the Friday and it was a good one: the four items, each with a figure, nineteen pounds at the foot.

The second builder read the four items, put the paper in his pocket and asked what the room was for. The washing, the baking and the children's boots, she said, none of which happened in it between November and March. He asked when the sun came into it. Never, she said, the window being in the north wall. He asked what she wanted to be true when the work was done. She wanted to stand in there on a January morning. Then he lifted a brick in the floor and found it bedded on bare earth, and put his knife into the plaster above the skirting, where it went in like cheese.

His estimate came on the Saturday with two figures on it. The first was her four items as she had written them, nineteen pounds at the foot, within five shillings of the other man's. Below that, ruled off plainly, a second scheme. The floor up and laid again on slate and lime. The wet plaster hacked off to four feet and rendered. The new window not in the north wall but in the west gable, where the afternoon sun stands from February onward. The doorway left alone, the lime-wash left until the walls were dry, the copper reset with a proper flue. Twenty pounds five, and one sentence at the foot: the first scheme gives you the four things on your paper, the second gives you a room you can stand up in in January, and the window costs five shillings more in the west wall than in the north.

She had the second. Be fair to the first man: his price was honest and he did what he was asked. He was simply the cheaper way of making a cold room colder.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

An enquiry that arrives already specified was thought out by somebody who is not you, and pricing it as it stands is agreeing to be judged on nothing but money. The rest of this letter is the argument for putting two schemes on one sheet of paper.

Begin with where a specification comes from. A neighbour over a fence, a magazine, or, as here, a man of your own trade who looked once and never came back. Whoever wrote it was not going to do the work, and wrote it in items, because items are what a person outside a trade can see, while the causes of her trouble are not. A floor bedded on bare earth is not an item.

Now see what pricing it does to you. Four items, three builders, three prices. Nothing on the paper tells her one of you from another but the figure at the foot, so she chooses by it, reasonably enough. You have been turned from a tradesman into a number, and no cheap rival did it to you. You did it the moment you agreed to price another man's scheme without comment. It is the discipline of finding out what will decide it before you put a price on paper, carried a step further back: you must first know whether the job in front of you is the job at all.

The remedy is not to refuse the list. Refuse it and you are the awkward man who would not answer a plain question, and awkwardness loses more work than dearness. Price the list exactly as she wrote it, so she can see you are not dodging, then set your own scheme beside it with the reason attached. She may compare the other men to your first column. Only you have given her a second.

Why it works has little to do with cleverness. A customer cannot choose a thing she has not been shown. Every builder in that town knew the window belonged in the west wall, and not one had written it where she could read it at her own table with a price beside it. It is the habit of asking what the job is instead of what the item is, done in ink.

Two cautions. Do not let your second scheme be the dearer one by habit, or you become the man who talks every job upwards. Here the difference was five shillings, and the five shillings was the whole argument. Be sure you are right, too. A second scheme is an opinion in writing, and if you are wrong about the damp you are wrong in her drawer for years.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Who wrote this list? Ask it aloud, pleasantly, of every specified enquiry. The answer tells you how much to believe.
2. What does the customer want to be true when the work is done? One sentence, in her words, written on the enquiry. If you cannot write it you are not estimating, you are quoting, and quoting is a trade anybody can enter.
3. What would I do here if nobody had handed me a paper? Price that as well. It is the only column on the sheet nobody else is competing for.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same trade, same nineteen pounds, the same four items. What had the second man priced?

The job. The first man priced four items, which were another man's guess at it, and priced them well. The second priced those four items too, and then priced the thing she actually wanted. One of those estimates could only be compared with other estimates. The other could not be compared with anything in the town.

The verse:

The list in your hand is a list someone wrote,
and the writing was never your own.
So price what she asked for, and price it in full,
then price what she wanted done.

Until next time. Go and take the last enquiry that arrived with its own list, and write on it, in the customer's words, what she wants to be true when the work is done.

P.S. The second scheme works even when the customer takes the first, because she keeps the sheet. Two winters on, when the money has come in, the only scheme in that house with a reason under it is yours.

Also in the archive: The One He Would Have, The Ledger That Would Not Lie Flat and The Slope He Left Alone.