Quote check
Is your plastering quote reasonable?
- 8Lines it reads against
- 6Scopes it looks for
Why plastering is worth checking
More of a plastering quote is arithmetic than of almost any other trade’s. Boards come from an area, screws from a board count, tape from the joints those boards make, plaster from the surface they leave. Each of those is a number you can work out from the room you are standing in.
The line the wall decides
The exception is the one that matters most, and the reading says so where it appears: the adhesive a wall takes is a property of the wall, not of the board. A flat blockwork wall takes about half what an old, bowed or rendered one does, and the same is true of a skim over existing plaster. A figure at the top of the range is often a tradesman who has looked at the wall.
No prices, anywhere
No prices appear anywhere on this page. Plastering is priced per square metre in some places and per day in others, and a rate that means something in one town means nothing two hours away. What travels is the quantity, so that is what is read — any money in a pasted quote is taken out first.
Your quote
The plastering quote you were given
Paste from an email, or open or drop a PDF, Excel, CSV or text file, or a photo of the quote. Amounts of money are taken out before anything is read — this page compares quantities, never prices.
Nothing you paste or open leaves this device.
The reading
What the quote says, against the job
Plastering · a room 13 by 11.5 ft, 8 ft to the ceiling, with 0 outside cornersa room 4 by 3.5 m, 2.4 m to the ceiling, with 0 outside corners
What it leaves out
Every line the job needs that nothing on the quote reads as, with the quantity your measurements produce.
What it adds
Lines this job's takeoff does not measure — labour, removal, hire, fees, anything else — each named for what it is.
What sits outside the range
Quantities above or below the computed range, by how much, in the quote's unit or converted and shown.
What to ask
One list of questions, in the quote's order, ready to copy and send. Questions, never a verdict.
Paste the quote above, or add its lines one at a time. The reading appears here as each line is read.
What it looks for
What a plastering quote has to mention
On this trade the list is more useful than the quantities: an extra bag of finish costs very little, and discovering on the second morning that the old plaster has to come off is a different conversation entirely. The reading names any of these the quote's words do not.
Preparing the background
What is already on the wall decides most of the work. Sound plaster can be skimmed over; blown or damp plaster has to come off, and a dusty or painted face needs sealing before anything will stick to it. This is the item most often discovered after the first morning.
Protection or cleaning up
Plastering is the dustiest trade in a house and the water carries it everywhere. Whether floors, stairs and fitted furniture are sheeted, and who cleans up at the end of each day, is worth establishing before the first bag is mixed.
Waste removal
Hacked-off plaster is heavy rather than bulky and fills a skip faster than people expect, and board offcuts are the opposite. Whether it is in the price, and who carries it out of the house, is a real cost either way.
Access equipment
A ceiling, a stairwell or anything above a standard wall height needs a tower or trestles rather than a step, and hiring one is priced by the week whether it is used every day or not.
Drying time
Fresh plaster has to dry before it is decorated, and forcing it with heat is how it cracks. In winter that can be weeks rather than days, which matters more to a schedule than to a price.
The textured ceiling coating
Textured coatings applied before 2000 may contain asbestos, which makes removal a licensed matter and over-boarding a common alternative. This is a survey question rather than a quantity, and it is settled before anybody scrapes anything.
Where this check stops
- It has not seen the wall. Everything about the background — whether it is sound, flat, damp, painted or already rendered — is a survey, and it moves the adhesive and the plaster more than anything this page can compute.
- It does not know labour, days, or how many plasterers turn up. A skim has to be finished in one pass while it is workable, which sets the size of a day’s work in a way no quantity shows.
- It cannot read a lump sum. A great many plastering quotes are one figure for the job, which is a perfectly normal way to price it.
- A quantity outside the range is a reason to ask, and nothing more. Every line the reading places names at least one ordinary reason a real figure differs.
- It is not advice, and it is not a second opinion on the work.
How the ranges are produced
Each line runs a published calculator twice, at each end of the single input that is a real choice rather than a fact — a waste allowance, a board size, a fixing centre, a coverage rate, a skim thickness. The reading prints which input it moved, so the width of a range is something you can argue with. A range with no stated reason is a hedge, and this one is not.
Nothing is worked out here that is not worked out on the calculator’s own page. Follow the link under any line, enter the same numbers, and the answer will match to the digit — including the units, which follow whichever market you have this site set to.
More quote checks
A check for every job the site takes off
Board, tile, roof, deck or drive: each has its own page, worked out from the same calculators as its takeoff.
Quantities, never prices
Every figure is a quantity your own measurements decide.
The working, one click away
Each line links to the calculator that produced it.
Nothing leaves this device
There is no account and no server to send a quote to.
Frequently asked questions
- My quote says “scrim” and this page says “joint tape”. Same thing?
- Yes. The trade has two vocabularies and most tools only speak one of them — scrim is joint tape, browning is brown coat, plasterboard is drywall. The reading knows both, and every line shows what it was read as, so a line in the other dialect can be matched by hand in one step if it was not matched already.
- The adhesive figure is nearly double mine. Is one of us out?
- Probably neither. Dot-and-dab adhesive is the widest line on any plastering quote because the quantity is decided by how far out of true the wall is, not by the board. The range spans a flat blockwork wall at one end and a bowed or previously rendered one at the other, and that is a genuine factor of two on the same room.
- My quote is one price with no quantities on it at all.
- Then the reading has no quantities to place, and the scopes it looks for are the whole value of this page. Asking what a lump sum includes — the background, the access, the waste, the drying — is the conversation that prevents the surprise, and it is a fair question to put to anybody.
- Should I send this to the plasterer?
- It is written so that you can. Nothing on it characterises anybody, every line states the assumption behind its own figure, and the questions are the ones a good tradesman answers in a sentence. The aim is a shorter conversation, not a confrontation.