and now to play the devil's advocate: i own a remodeling company and can pretty much give you a price for anything that can be done to a residence. the first thing that people don't realize is that i pay a ridiculous insurance premium for every hour that every employee works. workers comp, liability, taxes, licenses... all adds up. for a guy that makes $15/hr, he actually costs me $41/hr. that gets rolled in to the price. and that's a fairly low wage. anyways:
if it is a new installation, they may have purchased one color in bulk. if you want a different color, you pay a different price. specialty pergo flooring goes for roughly $arm+leg/room fully installed.
you can get basic 12" tile for $1sf or $4sf installed. with a specialty tile, the price of that tiling can go upwards of $10sf. grouting a smaller hex tile also takes a lot longer, and uses more material. just today i put down a 16'x21' floor with 2" webbed mosaic tiles. 336sf of 12" tiles would have been done before lunch as it is 336 tiles. however, as the owner was kind enough to pick out the tiling, if it wasn't webbed it would be something like 8 thousand tiles. do you know how much grout that was... i will forever hate this homeowner.
you can purchase a granite ctop for that. then you have to pay to have it professionally cut ($200 or more) and delivered (very heavy) and installed (four hours labor = ton of money)
i didn't type this out to be a cow about it or to tell you that you're wrong, more to help you see that you're not being ripped off. at least no more than anyone else.
oh and as for the feature wall: one man to paint a, we'll say 14'x10' wall... that takes half an hour to prep, fifteen to prime, thirty to let dry, twenty to paint, thirty to dry, twenty to paint, half an hour to clean up... 3 hours = $150 for the guy plus $50 for material plus $150 profit plus $50 for the hell of it. why, jim hit it right on the mark
