Steel and
padstones.
The beam scheme comes from the engineer, not the architect. Quotes priced off planning drawings alone routinely miss beams, padstones and the craneage or manual handling to get them in.
A real loft conversion quote priced from the drawings — 62 items totalling £70,317.93 excluding VAT, in Surrey. Use it as the structure for your own quote, or as the worked example of how a loft should be measured. Free, no email.
A main-roof loft conversion with dormer windows and rooflights plus a rear outrigger extension, priced to a fully-plastered finish with the engineer's beam scheme carried through. The bill carries the structural steel and beam scheme, the dormer and rooflight openings, the staircase, and the fire-protection and insulation build-ups that a loft has to satisfy for Building Control — the parts most commonly under-measured when a loft is priced by eye.
The beam scheme comes from the engineer, not the architect. Quotes priced off planning drawings alone routinely miss beams, padstones and the craneage or manual handling to get them in.
A habitable loft brings protected-route requirements — fire doors, ceiling upgrades, sometimes a full stair enclosure. It is a Building Control condition, not an optional extra, and it carries real cost.
Scaffold on a loft is priced by weeks, not by the erection. Underestimate the programme and the hire runs past the allowance — one of the most common overruns on a converted roof.
A quote a client can actually check has a measured quantity, a unit and a rate against every line, grouped into sections that add up to the tender sum. It should also state what is excluded and what has been assumed — foundation depth, ground conditions, who supplies what — because those are the things that move the price later. A single lump sum with no breakdown gives a client nothing to compare and gives you nothing to defend when the job changes.
Priced by hand from a full drawing set, a domestic extension typically takes a builder one to three evenings once the take-off is done. Waiting on a quantity surveyor usually means one to three weeks. QuoteWise produces a priced first pass from drawings with a median of about 12 minutes, which you then check and adjust rather than start from a blank page.
Most UK builders quote free for domestic work and absorb the cost, which is why quoting time is one of the biggest unpaid overheads in a small building business. Charging becomes more common where the pricing work is substantial — a full measured bill of quantities on a large refurbishment, or a tender that needs a quantity surveyor's involvement.
A take-off is the measurement stage: reading the drawings and extracting every quantity the job needs — square metres of brickwork, linear metres of skirting, numbers of lintels — before any price is applied. It is the part that takes the longest and the part that determines whether the quote is right, because a rate applied to a wrong quantity produces a confidently wrong number.
The quote is the client-facing document — sections, scope in plain English, and the tender sum. The bill of quantities is the working detail behind it: every measured line with its quantity, unit and rate. Both examples on this page are the same job in both forms, so you can see how one derives from the other.
Pricing an extension instead? See the extension example →
Drawings in, priced bill out. Your first three quotes are free.