Builders send plans and want a price by Friday. Quoting from plans is a skill: miss a ceiling height or a stairwell and the job's gone backwards before you've opened a tin. Here's a method that keeps it fast and catches the expensive mistakes.
1. Read the whole set first
Before you measure anything, go through every page. The floor plan, elevations, sections, the finishes schedule and the specs. Ceiling heights live on the sections. What gets painted, and what doesn't, lives in the finishes schedule. Note anything unusual: raked ceilings, voids, feature walls, timber to stain, steel to coat.
2. Check the scale
Check one dimension you know against the scale before you trust any measurement. A plan printed at the wrong size will throw every number out. Pick a long dimension written on the plan and measure it.
3. Measure room by room
- Walls: the room's perimeter times the ceiling height, less big openings. Small windows and doors usually aren't worth taking off.
- Ceilings: the floor area, plus extra for raked or coffered ceilings.
- Doors: count them, and note which are flush, panelled or glazed, and whether frames are included.
- Trims: skirtings and architraves by the lineal metre.
- Wet areas, stairwells and voids: measure separately. They're slower and need scaffold or tall ladders.
4. Turn areas into hours
Divide each area by how fast your crew does that surface. If your crew does walls at 10 square metres an hour for two coats, 400 square metres is 40 hours. Use your own crew's speed, from finished jobs, not a number from somewhere else. That's covered in how to price painting per square metre.
5. Price it line by line
Put each surface on its own quote line: hours times your charge-out rate, plus paint and sundries. Line by line pricing makes the quote easy for the builder to check, makes progress claims simple, and lets you see later which line ran over.
6. Check it before it goes
- Does the wall area look right against the floor area? On a normal single storey house, walls are often around three times the floor area.
- Did you include every room on every level, the garage, and any exterior items?
- Are prep, access equipment and travel priced, not assumed?
- Are exclusions written down: what you're not doing?
If your hourly rate is a guess, every line of the quote is a guess. Check it with the free rate check before you price the next set of plans.