Forty-One Items and Eleven Weeks
The schedule arrives as a PDF from a firm nobody in the business has heard of: forty-one numbered items across nine pages, each with a remedy and a figure beside it. Item 12 is the partitioned board room. Item 19 is the tea point installed in year two. Item 27 asks for the ceiling grid to be restored to the landlord's original layout, which nobody currently working for the tenant has ever seen. At the end there is a total, and under it a sentence inviting a discussion. The lease has eleven weeks to run and the facilities manager has been asked whether the number is real.
It is not one number and it never was. What arrived is three separate legal claims printed in one typeface: a claim that things are broken, a claim that things you added have to come back out, and a claim that the place needs painting. They are proved differently, they are capped differently, and only one of them is settled by looking at the building. Treating the total as a single figure to haggle down is how a tenant ends up paying for the removal of a partition the landlord was always going to take out anyway, and simultaneously missing the one item on the schedule that is going to cost more than the surveyor put against it.
The physical work has to be scoped anyway, because doing it yourself is the only counter-offer with any weight behind it. A tenant who can say what comes out, what it weighs, how many container exchanges the building's dock will take and what the redecoration measures is negotiating from a takeoff; a tenant who can only say the number feels high is negotiating from a feeling.
Three Claims Arriving Under One Cover
Repair is the claim about condition: the carpet is worn, the WC ceiling is stained, a door closer has failed. In England and Wales it is the head that section 18(1) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 puts a ceiling on — damages for breach of a covenant to keep or put premises in repair cannot exceed the amount by which the value of the landlord's reversion has been diminished, and are barred altogether where the premises are to be pulled down or so structurally altered that the repairs would be valueless. That statutory cap is why a landlord who has already appointed a designer to strip the floor back to shell for the next tenant is in a much weaker position than the schedule suggests.
Reinstatement is a different animal. It is the claim that alterations made under a licence have to be undone, and its source is the deed of licence rather than the repairing covenant — which is why it is generally treated as sitting outside the section 18(1) cap and measured instead on ordinary contractual principles. Redecoration is a third head again, usually its own covenant with its own trigger, and it is the one item on most schedules that is neither arguable nor expensive relative to the noise it generates. Sorting the forty-one items into these three buckets before reading a single figure is the whole first afternoon's work, and the buckets rarely divide the way the schedule's own numbering does.
| Head of claim | What it rests on | How it is measured | What limits it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disrepair | The repairing covenant in the lease, read against the condition at the date of the demise | The cost of putting right, tested against what a reasonable landlord would actually do | Section 18(1) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927: damages capped at the diminution in the reversion, and barred where the premises are to be demolished or structurally altered |
| Failure to reinstate alterations | The licence for alterations, and the yield-up covenant in the lease | The cost of removing the works and making good, plus the time to do it | The wording of the licence itself — an obligation triggered only on written demand, or dropped altogether if the landlord did not demand it in time |
| Failure to decorate | A separate decorating covenant, typically worded to bite in the last months of the term | Measured area, the coat count the covenant names, and the specification it names with it | The covenant's own wording, including whether it survives a strip-out that removes the surfaces it described |
| Consequential loss | Rent, rates, service charge and fees for the period the works would take | The programme for the remedial works, not the programme the landlord would like | Whether the landlord genuinely loses that period — a floor relet or redeveloped immediately loses nothing |
The Consents Are the Scope, Not the Schedule
Somewhere in the tenant's files, usually in a shared drive folder named after a project manager who left in 2019, is the bundle that decides most of this: the licences for alterations, one for every consented change to the demise. Each carries its own reinstatement condition and they are not written to a house style — three licences on the same lease routinely say three different things. One requires reinstatement at the end of the term without qualification. One requires it only if the landlord serves written notice, sometimes with a deadline that has already passed. One is silent, which means no reinstatement obligation was created at all, however firmly the schedule asserts otherwise.
The bundle also settles who owns what. Anything that was in the demise when the lease was granted is the landlord's, and removing it is damage rather than compliance — the ceiling grid, the original perimeter trunking, the base-build luminaires. Anything the tenant installed is a tenant's fixture or a chattel, and the distinction decides whether it can be taken away or has to be left. Work carried out by the previous tenant and taken on with the demise belongs to nobody's licence and is the single most common source of an item that appears on a schedule and quietly disappears from it once the deeds are read.
Then check whether the lease is actually ending. If it was not contracted out of Part II of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 and no notice has been served either way, the tenancy continues by statute past the contractual expiry date and this is not a terminal schedule at all — it is an interim one, which is a different negotiation with different remedies. It is also worth noting what has just stopped applying: the Leasehold Property (Repairs) Act 1938, which requires a landlord to serve notice and obtain the court's leave before pursuing disrepair, only reaches leases of seven years or more with at least three years left to run. With eleven weeks on the clock, that protection has already expired.
Do this reading before instructing anybody to price anything. A scope built from the schedule prices the landlord's case; a scope built from the consents prices your obligation, and the gap between them is the first and largest reduction available.
- Pull every licence for alterations granted under the lease, including ones granted to a predecessor and assigned with it, and lay them out against a floor plan.
- Mark each licence's reinstatement wording on the plan in three colours: unconditional, on written demand only, and silent.
- Check whether any conditional demand has actually been served, in the form the licence requires, within any period the licence sets.
- Identify base-build elements the schedule has asked you to remove — grid, trunking, base luminaires, WC fit-out — and take them out of the scope entirely.
- Confirm the tenancy is genuinely ending, and on what date, before treating the schedule as terminal.
- Photograph and video the whole demise before a single item moves, with a date on the file rather than written on a board.
One Bay of a Category B Floor, Taken Apart
A fitted-out office floor is five distinct trades stacked into about a metre of vertical space, and a strip-out crew meets them in almost exactly the reverse order they were installed. What makes the sequence unavoidable is not the fixings but the services: the partitions cannot come down while the small power and data in them is live, and the ceiling cannot come down while the sprinkler drops passing through it are charged. The first week of any strip-out is therefore an electrical and mechanical isolation exercise wearing a demolition hat. It is also the week the refurbishment and demolition survey has to be already in hand rather than still being commissioned: in stock fitted out before 2000 the ceiling tiles, the vinyl floor tiles and their bitumen adhesive, the boarding round a riser and a textured coating on a soffit are all candidates, and the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 make finding out a precondition of breaking anything rather than a courtesy. Which survey answers which question, and which removals are licensed, is set out in the asbestos guide next door.
Reading the stack as separate quantities is what stops the estimate collapsing into one lump, because each layer leaves through a different gate: tiles fill volume and weigh nothing, containment and ductwork are the metal that pays, board is the tonnage, and the panels are dense in a way that catches out anyone loading them by eye.
One bay of a fitted-out floor, soffit to slab
- Services in the ceiling void — ductwork, VAV terminals, luminaires, sprinkler drops and cable containment — the metal fraction that carries almost all of the diversion tonnage C&D Debris Recycling Diversion Rate Calculator
- Suspended ceiling grid and tiles — mineral fibre lay-in tiles on an exposed tee grid, the bulkiest and lightest stream on the job and the one that fills a container before anything else does Dumpster/Skip Container Size Selector
- Partitions and glazed screens — metal studs boarded each side, sometimes twice where an acoustic rating was specified, and dying into the ceiling or carrying on past it to the soffit — which changes both the board quantity and the licence it was built under Gypsum Waste Cubic Yards to Tons Calculator
- Raised access floor panels and pedestals — steel-encapsulated panels on adjustable pedestals, dense enough that a stack of them reaches a lift's rated load long before it looks like a full load Demolition Debris Weight-to-Volume Conversion Calculator
- Floor boxes and abandoned cabling — grommets, floor boxes and years of accumulated data cable, much of which was already dead when the last fit-out went in and should have left with it Scrap Metal Recycling Value Calculator
- Structural slab and screed — the landlord's, and the only part of this stack that any published demolition swell factor was ever written to describe Demolition Bulk Volume Swell Calculator
The Partitions Are the Tonnage
Board is where a strip-out estimate is won or lost, because the quantity comes from a schedule nobody keeps: linear metres of partition, by height, by board layers per face. A single-layer partition at 2.7 metres puts a little over five square metres of board into the container for every linear metre of wall. Specify the same wall with two layers each side, which is what an acoustic rating between a board room and an open floor usually demands, and that linear metre produces four faces instead of two. How a metal stud partition is built is worked through in its own guide; what matters here is that the layer count is a fact about your building, established by opening one up rather than assumed.
The destination is prescribed rather than chosen. Gypsum has to be kept out of mixed non-hazardous waste because in anaerobic landfill conditions it can generate hydrogen sulphide, and the acceptance criteria set out in Council Decision 2003/33/EC direct non-hazardous gypsum-based material to cells that receive no biodegradable waste — carried into domestic law here by the Landfill (England and Wales) Regulations 2002 as amended. In practice that means a segregated container, a separate transfer note, and a crew who have been told, because board thrown into the general skip on a Friday afternoon reclassifies the whole load.
Board out of a partition is also dirtier than board off a delivery: skim, tape, paint, trunking clipped to its face and screws by the hundred, against a recycler's acceptance criteria that will say what fraction of that they tolerate. Stripping the trunking and sockets out first costs an hour a room and is the difference between a segregated stream and a contaminated one.
Build the volume from linear metres of partition times height times layers, then convert it here — the underlying figure is around a quarter of a short ton per cubic yard for broken board thrown loose, which is why the tonnage looks small next to the number of containers it needs.
The volume of gypsum waste in cubic yards.
Approximate weight
2.5 short tons
About 0.25 short tons per cubic yard (500 lb/yd³) for broken plasterboard thrown loose into a container; published C&D factors run 394-500 lb/yd³. The board itself is roughly twice as dense. A planning figure, not a specification. Confirm the figure with your supplier or waste contractor before relying on it.
- Conversion factor applied
- 0.25 short tons per cu yd
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Gypsum Waste Cubic Yards to Tons Calculator: 2.5 short tons — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- Paper-faced board takes water up rather than shedding it, and it is light enough that a soaking adds a far bigger share of its own weight than the same rain adds to rubble. Wet board also softens and slumps, so the volume you measured moves as well as the tonnage.
- A stripped partition is not board. The studs and track come down with it and both are lighter in bulk than broken board, so a whole-partition volume overstates the board tonnage — more so again where the wall was insulated. Where gypsum has to be kept out of mixed waste that material is leaving the board container anyway, so split the pile before you measure it.
- Sheet count is the better route only on a strip-out. Counting sheets off a wall against the manufacturer's published weight per sheet skips the density step entirely, but on new boarding the waste is the offcut fraction rather than the sheets, and the same sum returns several times the tonnage that reaches the container. Published weights are for new, dry, unskimmed board, which is not what comes off a wall either.
Plasterboard offcuts are among the bulkiest waste streams on a fit-out, and they are light enough that containers fill by volume long before they approach a weight limit. Gypsum also has to be segregated: most jurisdictions require it to be kept out of general mixed waste, because in landfill conditions it can generate hydrogen sulphide. Planning a separate container for board offcuts is therefore a compliance matter as much as an efficiency one.
Panels, Pedestals and a Lift With a Plate On It
The raised access floor is the layer that surprises people, because it looks like a floor and behaves like ballast. A medium-grade panel to BS EN 12825, or to the PSA performance specification MOB PF2 PS/SPU that a great deal of British office stock was built to, is a chipboard core in a steel tray, and a pallet of them stacked by someone judging it by eye is heavier than anything else that will go into the goods lift that week. The plate inside the lift car states a rated load, the building's own management will have a view about it, and neither of them cares that the load looks like flooring.
So convert the panel count into a weight before it is stacked, and run the pedestals and stringers as a separate line since they are steel and go to a different gate. The same arithmetic answers a second question that only appears on upper floors: a staging bay heaped with floor panels on a slab designed for office live load is a point load nobody drew, and where that bay is not over a column or a beam line it is a question for the building's structural information rather than for the crew's judgement.
Run the access floor as its own stream with its own density rather than folding it into a strip-out average — it is the densest thing leaving the floor, and the number you want out of it is the one the lift plate is compared against.
The estimated debris volume — switch the unit to match your skip or container ticket.
The material's density — mixed construction & demolition debris commonly runs 300-800 lb/yd³ (180-475 kg/m³).
Estimated debris weight
6 tons
Debris density varies enormously with material mix (loose wood/insulation vs. concrete/masonry can differ by 5-10x) — use a density figure specific to your actual debris composition, ideally confirmed against a recent weight ticket for similar material, rather than a generic average.
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Demolition Debris Weight-to-Volume Conversion Calculator: 6 tons — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- A total tonnage is not a number of loads, and loads are what you pay for. A container fills by volume or by weight, whichever arrives first: concrete and rubble weigh a truck out at a fraction of the container's rated volume, while light mixed debris cubes out long before the axle limit is anywhere near. Dividing this tonnage by a container's volume rating undercounts loads on heavy material every time.
- Density is a wet-weight property. An open container of gypsum, timber and insulation standing through a wet week gains weight without gaining volume, and the scale at the gate charges whatever is on the truck that day. A density taken from a dry load, or from a summer weight ticket, runs well under a winter one for exactly the same debris.
- A figure off a weight ticket is an as-loaded density, with the way that load was placed already baked into it. The same debris tipped loose from a chute, packed down by a grab, or hand-stacked into the container differs by around a third — so a density borrowed from a job that handled the material differently carries that difference across even when the material mix matches perfectly.
The Only Masonry in the Building
Almost nothing on an office strip-out is masonry, which is exactly why the small amount that exists gets missed. It is the blockwork somebody built around a comms room for its fire rating, the screed infill poured where a floor box was moved, the plinth under a chiller on the plant deck, and the brick-up of an opening formed under a licence eight years ago that now has to be reversed. Every one of those is a solid volume that becomes a considerably larger loose volume the moment it is broken, and the bulking arithmetic behind that — bank against loose, method against lump size — is argued out at length in the demolition guide next door rather than repeated here.
What is specific to this job is that reinstatement runs the process in both directions at once. Taking a blockwork enclosure out generates rubble; putting an opening back that a licence obliges you to close consumes new block, and the same crew does both in the same week. Neither half is large enough to justify a separate container, which means the masonry usually ends up sharing a box with something it should not share a box with, and the load gets classified as mixed at the gate.
Cutting is the other reason to identify this work early. Screed, block and concrete broken or cut dry generate respirable crystalline silica, and the controls are prescribed rather than advisory: the specified exposure control methods in OSHA 29 CFR 1926.1153 name the tool and the control together, and the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 impose the equivalent duty here. In an occupied multi-let building that resolves to water suppression, on-tool extraction and an agreement with the managing agent about the hours, because dust and noise both travel through a shared riser.
The published factors this offers cover concrete, block, brick and stone — which on a fit-out means only the enclosures, plinths, screed infills and brick-ups, and not a single square metre of the partitions or the ceiling.
The intact, in-place volume of the masonry or concrete before demolition.
The type of masonry/concrete being demolished — different materials bulk by different amounts.
Estimated bulked (swelled) volume
26 cubic yards
These are typical demolition-estimating swell factors, not a universal engineering constant — actual bulking varies with the demolition method (mechanical breaking vs. explosive vs. hand demolition) and resulting debris piece size. Use a higher factor for finely broken debris and confirm against your hauler/estimator's experience on similar material.
- Swell factor used
- 1.3 x
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Demolition Bulk Volume Swell Calculator: 26 cubic yards — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- The in-place volume from a length x height x thickness take-off is the structure alone, and the container receives everything attached to it. Plaster and render, screed, cavity insulation, timber lintels and bearers built into masonry, tile and its bedding — none of that contributed to the solid volume entered, all of it leaves in the same load, and on a finished internal wall it is a substantial share of what goes out.
- The swell factors are for material that breaks into loose pieces, and reinforced concrete does not. The bar holds broken slabs together, so the debris stands in tangled sections occupying far more space than 1.3 times its solid volume until the reinforcement is cut out. A reinforced slab, a ring beam or an RC frame needs the bar handled as its own operation, and the volume on the ground before that happens bears no relation to this figure.
Six Till Eight, One Dock, One Goods Lift
On a demolition site the constraint on containers is the stockpile. In a multi-let office building it is the diary. There is one loading bay, it is shared with the other tenants and their deliveries, the managing agent will let strip-out traffic use it outside core hours, and that is a window of perhaps two hours at each end of the day. Everything leaving the floor passes through one goods lift, in cages or bins that fit the car, and is tipped into whatever container the bay can hold — which in a basement dock is frequently not a roll-off at all but a compactor or a row of wheeled bins.
That inverts the usual sizing question. The container size is chosen to suit the dock, not the volume, and the volume then tells you how many exchanges the programme needs. Work it in that order: loose volume per stream, converted to a container count at the size the bay accepts, divided by the exchanges the agent will permit per week. If the answer is more weeks than the lease has left, the constraint is the building, and that negotiation with the landlord's facilities team starts today rather than in week four.
Packing efficiency belongs at the low end of its range for the same reason. Nobody runs a machine bucket over a bin in a basement to work the load down, so ceiling tiles and carpet go in exactly as they came out of the lift.
Run each stream through separately and read the required capacity in the breakdown rather than the recommended stock size, because in a basement dock the size is already fixed by the bay and the number you actually want is how many times it has to be swapped.
The estimated loose volume of debris you need to haul away.
How solidly the debris packs into the container — irregular debris leaves air gaps.
Recommended dumpster size
20 cubic yards
Standard sizes and availability vary by hauler and region — confirm exact dimensions and weight limits with your specific waste hauler, since some materials (e.g. concrete, dirt, roofing) have separate weight-based limits regardless of the container's volume.
- Required capacity accounting for packing
- 20 cubic yards
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Dumpster/Skip Container Size Selector: 20 cubic yards — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
What this calculation does not cover
- The smallest box that holds the debris is not always the box the site can take. A 40-yard roll-off is around 22 ft (6.5 m) long and wants roughly 60 ft (18 m) of straight, level approach for the truck to winch it off, plus about 23 ft (7 m) of overhead clear of wires and branches; a 10 or a 15 will sit in a driveway where a 40 cannot even turn around. Check the drop before ordering the size the volume asked for.
- Volume here means level-full. Roll-offs are hauled with nothing above the top rail, because the load has to be sheeted and it has to be legal down the road, so a container heaped over the sides is either re-worked on site before it leaves or left behind. The packing efficiency you entered describes air trapped between the pieces, not the freeboard the driver needs above them.
- One box means one mixed load, and mixed is the expensive way to get rid of material. Clean concrete, clean fill, scrap metal and cardboard each go out at their own rate, sometimes at no charge or a rebate, and dropping any of them into the general box carries them all at the mixed construction-and-demolition rate. A diversion target usually means a second, smaller container rather than a single larger one.
Diversion Has Become a Lease-End Document
A recycling rate used to be a nice line in a completion report. On a commercial strip-out it is now evidence, for two separate audiences. The landlord's own reporting increasingly depends on it — a floor being handed back into a building assessed under BREEAM UK Refurbishment and Fit-out, or a fit-out being run to the RICS Ska rating, needs the waste data from the strip-out that preceded it, and it is your contractor who holds it. Meanwhile the waste hierarchy duty in the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011 and the declaration that goes on the transfer note make the sequence of reuse, recycling and disposal a legal statement rather than a preference.
It is also the strongest evidence available against the part of a schedule that prices disposal, because a landlord's surveyor has almost certainly assumed a mixed-waste rate across the lot. A tenant who can produce the metal tonnage against the total, with tickets behind it, is not arguing about recycling — they are demonstrating that the disposal assumption was wrong, item by item. The counting rules for the numerator matter as much as the tonnage: salvage leaving for reuse counts differently from material going to a recycler, and how those figures are assembled into a report is worked through in the reporting guide rather than here.
Feed it weighbridge tickets rather than estimates, and keep the numerator honest — recycled and salvaged material only, with the mixed skips sitting in the denominator where they belong.
The portion of project debris that was recycled or salvaged rather than landfilled.
The total weight of all debris generated by the project, recycled and landfilled combined.
Recycling diversion rate
75.01 %
Verify your specific certification program's (e.g. LEED) exact calculation methodology and documentation requirements (weight tickets, hauler diversion reports) — some programs exclude certain material categories or require third-party-verified weight tickets rather than estimates.
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
C&D Debris Recycling Diversion Rate Calculator: 75.01 % — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
What this calculation does not cover
- The rate is weight divided by weight — nothing in it knows what the material was. One heavy inert stream, concrete or scrap steel, can carry the entire percentage while most of the light packaging and mixed waste on site still goes to landfill.
- It counts weight that left site in a recycling or salvage container, not weight that was actually reprocessed. Loads rejected as contaminated at the sorting facility, sorting residues, and material burned for energy or used as landfill cover all still count as diverted here.
- Excavated soil, land-clearing arisings, and hazardous or otherwise regulated streams are treated as ordinary debris weight if you enter them. Whether they may be counted at all, and on which side of the sum, is set by the scheme you report to, not by this arithmetic.
- Nothing checks that your two figures cover the same scope or the same reporting period, and the calculation produces no evidence of its own. It does not replace the weighbridge tickets and hauler diversion reports a submittal is judged on, and some programs will not accept an estimated figure at all.
- There is no threshold anywhere in this calculation. It will not tell you whether the number you get earns a certification credit, meets your project waste management plan's target, or satisfies a local diversion ordinance — those baselines and their counting rules live in the scheme document.
Two Coats Is a Number Somebody Wrote Into the Lease
The decorating covenant is the item on the schedule that behaves least like the others, because it does not ask a surveyor to form a view about condition. It states a specification. The common drafting requires the tenant, in the last months of the term, to paint all previously painted internal surfaces with a stated number of coats of good quality paint, in colours the landlord approves. Two coats is the usual number and it is contractual: whether the wall needs two is not the test, and neither is whether it looks acceptable after one.
That makes it the one head of claim you can price on the first afternoon, and price accurately, because the only unknowns are measured area and the spreading rate on the tin. Which is also where the arguments live. Measure the paintable area after the strip-out rather than before — removing partitions deletes both faces of every wall that goes, and it usually deletes rather more painted area than it exposes. A mist coat on the newly made-good areas is not one of the covenanted coats, it is preparation, and a schedule that has priced two coats onto fresh board has priced the job short rather than long. And the covenant almost always says internal surfaces, which on a floorplate with a glazed elevation means the wall run, not the glass.
If it comes to an argument about whether what you did complied, two documents govern the workmanship: BS 6150, the code of practice for painting of buildings, and BS 8000-12, the workmanship code covering decorative wallcoverings and painting. Neither publishes a spreading rate and no calculator can — the rate belongs to the specific product, printed on its own data sheet, and varies by finish, by colour and enormously by whether the substrate is sealed. Take it from the tin you are buying. What the substrate demands, and when a colour change forces a third coat regardless of the lease, is covered in the interior painting guide.
Run the arithmetic room by room rather than for the floor as a whole. The covenant is drafted around the demise, but the work is done in rooms, and a cellular suite of six offices holds a great deal more wall than an open floor of the same area.
This works the perimeter of a rectangular room and subtracts openings at a standard door and window size, so on a glazed elevation take the glass out by shortening the wall run rather than by counting windows — and enter the coat count the covenant states rather than the one the wall needs.
The length of the room, wall to wall.
The width of the room, wall to wall.
Floor-to-ceiling height.
Doors are not painted with wall paint, so their area is subtracted.
Windows are not painted with wall paint, so their area is subtracted.
What each door takes off the walls. The default suits a standard interior door with its frame.
What each window takes off the walls. The default suits a typical window.
Most walls need 2 coats for even, opaque coverage.
The area one unit of your specific paint covers — the spread rate printed on the tin.
Estimated paint needed
1.704 gal
- Gross wall area
- 392 ft²
- Doors + windows area (subtracted)
- 51.13 ft²
- Paintable area
- 340.87 ft²
- Total area to coat
- 681.74 ft²
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Paint Calculator: 1.7 gal — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
Schematic layout — positions are illustrative, quantities are exact. This calculator is told how many doors and windows there are, never where they sit or how big each one is, so they are drawn evenly spaced at the standard allowance it deducts. Moving one would change nothing in the numbers above.
What this calculation does not cover
- One area stands for every door and one for every window, so a room with a sliding patio door and a small landing window takes the same off the wall for each; enter the average of the openings a field stands for and the total taken off is exact, though no single wall's share is.
- Gross wall area comes from the room perimeter, 2 × (length + width) × height, which describes a closed rectangle: an L-shaped room, a chimney breast, a bay recess or a stairwell wall is not represented, and the one height figure is applied to all four walls whether or not the ceiling runs level.
- Skirting boards, architraves and picture rails stay inside the paintable area even though they are usually finished in trim paint, and no separate volume is worked out for the door leaves and window frames whose area was taken away.
- A single spread rate multiplies every coat alike, so the thirstier first pass over bare, patched or heavily textured plasterboard is not separated from the lighter finish coat, and no primer or sealer is part of the litre figure.
- Nothing in the arithmetic allows for paint left in the tray, held in a roller sleeve, or kept back for touch-ups — the litres shown are the surface's bare requirement, and only the cost line rounds anything up, to whole US gallons.
Weighing the Schedule Against the Reversion
With a scope built from the consents, a takeoff behind it and a decorating figure nobody disputes, the negotiation stops being about the total. In England and Wales the framework is the Pre-Action Protocol for Claims for Damages in Relation to the Physical State of Commercial Property at Termination of a Tenancy: the landlord serves the schedule and a quantified demand, endorsed by a surveyor confirming that in their opinion the works are necessary and the costs reasonable, and the tenant responds within a reasonable time — the Protocol names fifty-six days as the usual period. The response is an item-by-item answer in the schedule's own format, which is why these end up as Scott Schedules with each side's position in adjacent columns.
The question that decides the money is what the landlord is going to do with the floor. If the reversion is being marketed as fitted, the disrepair items are real losses. If a designer has already been appointed to strip it to shell and grey box it for the market, then the works in the schedule are superseded by the landlord's own scheme, and section 18(1) is doing exactly what it was written to do — the loss is the diminution in the reversion, not the cost of works nobody will ever carry out. Establishing which of those is true is worth more than every line item argued individually, and it is an evidential question: marketing particulars, agents' briefs, planning applications, and what the floor above did when it came back last year.
None of that removes the value of the physical takeoff. The diminution argument narrows the claim; the takeoff prices what survives it, and it also answers the alternative a landlord will offer, which is to let you do the works yourself in the last weeks of the term. That is worth taking only if the dock, the lift and the exchange arithmetic say it is deliverable in the time left — and by this point you know whether they do.
- Sort every item into disrepair, reinstatement, decoration or consequential loss before responding to any figure.
- Answer each item on the licence wording first, on the condition evidence second, and on price last.
- Price the works you accept from your own takeoff and your own contractor, not by discounting the schedule's rates.
- Establish the landlord's intentions for the floor in writing, and gather the evidence for them from outside the correspondence.
- Commission a diminution valuation where the intended works look like supersession, and exchange it under the Protocol rather than holding it back.
- Keep the decorating figure separate and settle it early — it is small, it is provable, and conceding it buys credibility on the items that are not.
The Last Van, and the File That Goes With It
Handing back is a documentary act as much as a physical one. What goes with the keys is the photographic record taken before anything moved, the consent bundle with the reinstatement position marked on a plan, the transfer notes with their receiving sites named, the diversion figures with the tickets behind them, and the decorating specification against the covenant's own wording. Each exists to answer a question somebody will ask after the demise is no longer accessible — which is the moment the tenant loses the ability to prove anything at all.
Two items nobody asks for are worth adding. A record of what was left in place at the landlord's own request, because a verbal agreement in week two that the tea point could stay becomes a schedule item in month six unless somebody wrote it down. And the lamps and luminaires, which leave under their own regime: tubes are hazardous waste and the fittings are electrical equipment, handled here under the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations 2013, in the United States under the universal waste rule at 40 CFR Part 273, with pre-1979 American ballasts raising a separate question about polychlorinated biphenyls under 40 CFR Part 761.
The eleven weeks, in the order they have to happen
The workspace opens on the decorating figure, because it is the one head of claim that can be priced before a single argument is settled: a 14 by 9 metre suite at 2.7 metres, two internal doors, two coats at 10 square metres per litre. Replace the geometry with your own rooms and set the coat count from the covenant rather than from the wall. On a glazed elevation, take the glass out by shortening the wall run — the window count subtracts a standard domestic window and will understate a curtain-walled bay badly.
- Licence bundle read and marked on a plan — Unconditional reinstatement, reinstatement on written demand, and silence are three different obligations. Silence creates none, whatever the schedule asserts.
- Base-build elements struck out of the scope — Grid, perimeter trunking, base luminaires and anything present at the date of the demise belong to the landlord. Removing them is damage, not compliance.
- Partition schedule by run, height and layers per face — Board quantity is generated by the number of layers, not by the length of wall. Two layers each side doubles the tonnage for the same plan.
- Access floor and services weighed as their own streams — Panels are the densest thing leaving the floor and the metals are the diversion tonnage. Averaged into a strip-out density, both are wrong.
- Dock window, lift capacity and permitted exchanges confirmed — The container size is set by the bay, not by the volume. What the volume decides is how many swaps the remaining weeks have to absorb.
- Landlord's intentions for the floor established in evidence — Marketing particulars, appointed designers and what happened to the floor above. This decides the size of the claim more than any single line item does.
- Photographic record dated before anything moves — Condition, extent and every consented alteration in place. Once the demise is handed back there is nothing left to photograph and nothing left to prove.
Opens the calculators above on one screen with the dimensions from this article already filled in. Quantities only — this site publishes no price list, because local prices vary too much to publish honestly.