How to bid masonry work as a subcontractor

What you are actually bidding

The masonry package is short on sections and long on scope creep. Settle the boundary before you price a square foot, because on a cavity wall job the money leaks at the edges of Division 04, not in the middle of it.

• 04 20 00 Unit Masonry, which splits into 04 22 00 Concrete Unit Masonry for CMU and 04 21 00 Clay Unit Masonry for brick veneer.
• 04 05 13 Masonry Mortaring and 04 05 16 Masonry Grouting. Mortar is always yours. Grout usually is, but read the spec, because on some jobs bond beam and cell grout are written into the concrete package.
• 04 05 19 Masonry Anchorage and Reinforcing. Joint reinforcement, wall ties, anchors. Vertical rebar in the cells is frequently specified back under 03 20 00 Concrete Reinforcing, and that is a supply and install question, not a section number question.

Then five boundaries that decide whether your number is even comparable to the other bidders:

1. Reinforcing and grout, supply versus place. Bar supplied by the rebar fabricator and placed by you, supplied and placed by you, or supplied by you and grouted by the concrete sub while they pump. All three happen on real jobs. Name the one you priced.
2. Lintels and loose steel. Masonry lintel blocks with bar and grout are yours. Loose steel angle lintels over openings are often furnished under 05 50 00 Metal Fabrications and set by the mason. Precast lintels are a third answer. The lintel schedule gives you sizes, and a general note on a different sheet tells you who furnishes them.
3. Flashing and the air barrier at the cavity. Through-wall flashing, weeps, drainage mat, cavity insulation and the air barrier on the backup wall (07 27 00 Air Barriers) sit physically inside your wall, are drawn by the architect, and are usually specified in Division 07. This is the largest cavity wall scope gap there is.
4. Scaffolding and hoisting. Sometimes the GC carries it under temporary facilities. Often not.
5. Cold weather protection. Enclosure, temporary heat, heated materials and covered walls, per the cold weather construction requirements in the masonry specification.

Read the drawings for your sheets

Masonry is the trade whose quantities live on the architect's sheets and whose requirements live on the engineer's. Read only one and you will price half the wall.

• Exterior elevations give veneer extents, coursing, soldier courses, banding and the pattern changes that cost labour hours rather than material.
• Wall sections and the wall type legend beat the floor plans. The plan shows a line. The wall type tells you that line is 8 inch CMU backup, a 2 inch cavity, insulation, air barrier and 4 inch brick, which is two masonry quantities on one line, not one.
• The S sheets carry the reinforcing schedule, bond beam details and grouting requirements. Vertical bar size and spacing, horizontal joint reinforcement spacing, bond beam locations, and whether the wall is fully or partially grouted. None of it is on the architectural sheets and all of it is cost.
• Door and window schedules give opening sizes for your deductions and, more usefully, the jamb, head and sill conditions that drive the labour around each opening.
• Roof plan and details for the parapet. Parapet masonry above the roof line hides on an elevation and is the most expensive masonry on the job per square foot, because of access, both faces, cap and flashing.
• The specification. Mortar type, unit strength, sample panel or mockup, testing and who pays for it, cleaning, water repellent, cold weather. The words carry more cost than the geometry.

Getting the quantities right

Masonry is bid per square foot of wall face, taken off separately for every unit type and thickness, then converted to units. Standard modular brick at a 3/8 inch joint runs 6.75 brick per square foot of wall, and 8 by 16 nominal CMU runs 1.125 units per square foot. Those conversions are the easy part of the job.

What the obvious square foot takeoff misses:

• Openings deductions, and the fact that nobody handles them the same way. Some estimators deduct gross openings, some deduct nothing below a size threshold because the jamb, head and sill work around a small opening costs more labour than the units it saves. Both are defensible. Failing to say which you did is not, because bid leveling compares your square footage against everyone else's. State the rule in the proposal.
• Bond pattern and unit waste. Stack bond, running bond with a soldier course, rowlock sills and header courses all cut differently, and breakage on brick is real. Derive your waste percentage per unit type from your own completed jobs rather than applying one number across the elevation.
• Corners, returns and jambs are linear, not area. Outside corners, control joint jambs and opening returns consume special units and disproportionate labour. Take them off in linear feet alongside the area.
• Single wythe versus backup plus veneer. Four hundred square feet of 8 inch single wythe CMU and four hundred square feet of CMU backup with brick veneer are the same elevation area and roughly double the work. Quantify by wall type, never by elevation.
• Control joints in linear feet, with sash units, backer rod and sealant, and a clear answer on who is doing the sealant.
• Scaffolding by wall face area and duration. That is a schedule quantity, not a takeoff quantity, and it moves when the GC's sequence moves.

Here is the gotcha. Grout and reinforcing quantities do not move with the square footage at all. If an addendum tightens vertical bar spacing from 48 inches on centre to 32 inches (illustrative, recompute against your own drawings), the wall area on the elevation does not change by a single square foot, while grouted cells and vertical bar go up by half. An estimator who priced the elevation and never opened the reinforcing schedule misses that addendum completely, because nothing they measured changed. Cell grout comes off bar spacing and grouted cell count, not off wall area.

What the GC checks when leveling masonry bids

Leveling is the GC normalizing every masonry proposal onto one common scope. Expect them to check:

• Square footage by unit type and thickness against their own takeoff, plus your openings rule.
• Reinforcing and grout, supplied by whom, placed by whom, and whether horizontal joint reinforcement is in.
• Lintels, item by item, split between loose steel, precast and masonry lintel blocks.
• Cavity items, listed individually: through-wall flashing, weeps, drainage mat, cavity insulation, air barrier.
• Scaffolding, hoisting and mast climbers, and whether they were assumed as GC provided.
• Cold weather protection, enclosure and temporary heat.
• Mockup or sample panel, prism and mortar testing, and who pays.
• Cleaning and water repellent at the end of the job.
• The brick allowance. Brick is often carried as an allowance per thousand because the architect has not selected it at bid time. State the allowance rate and the count you carried, so a selection change is a lookup rather than a fight.
• Unit prices for adds.

Anything you left silent gets filled in with an assumption, and the assumption will not favour you. The cavity items are the worst case, because flashing has to go in as the wall goes up. You cannot come back for it later, so if the drawings are ambiguous you will be asked to install it on the wall whether or not you priced it. Put it in inclusions or exclusions by name.

Structure the proposal

1. The number, with square footage by wall type and the unit counts behind it.
2. Inclusions, as items rather than a paragraph.
3. Exclusions, the same way. This is the most valuable section in the document.
4. Clarifications and assumptions. Openings deduction rule, grout basis stated as bar spacing and grouted cell count, lintel furnish and install split, scaffolding, cold weather, mockup, access and laydown, final cleaning.
5. Unit prices for the likely adds: per square foot of CMU by thickness, per square foot of veneer, per linear foot of bond beam, per each lintel type, per cubic yard of grout, per linear foot of control joint, per thousand brick above the allowance.

Price your markup on a cost you can defend line by line, and keep the takeoff that produced the square footage.

Where this fits

When the GC calls to level, the mason who can open the takeoff and show which sheet a quantity came from wins the conversation. Ruh reads the drawing set, measures the scope, and prices the measured quantities against your own price book, with every line traceable back to the sheet it came from.