It definitely took more than 3 hours, I'm not superman lol. Everything was made from scratch. The admin panel took most of my time. Keep in mind I also made the design, registered the domain name and set up the hosting. Support was also provided, we got together so I could explain how he could manage the website on his own. It was my first real freelance project though, so I let him choose the price.
Lol, dude, so you're where the Chinese companies outsource to :).
Joke aside, I suggest using Django in such low budget projects if the admin is a selling point. Will save you some time at least (In Django a very slick admin is automatically there for you). Best of the luck.