How to bid painting work as a subcontractor

Start with what you are actually bidding

Painting sits in Division 09 of CSI MasterFormat, and the package is usually spread across more than one section:

• 09 91 00 Painting, split into 09 91 13 Exterior Painting and 09 91 23 Interior Painting. The bulk of the work.
• 09 93 00 Staining and Transparent Finishing. Field-finished wood, stains, clear coats.
• 09 96 00 High-Performance Coatings. Epoxies, elastomerics, chemical-resistant systems, intumescent coatings.

Four boundaries decide whether your number holds:

Shop primer versus field finish. Structural steel, hollow metal frames, lintels and miscellaneous metals arrive with a shop primer. The question the drawings almost never answer directly is whether you are touching up damaged shop primer or field priming and finishing the member. Those are different jobs. Also read what the primer is: galvanizing needs its own prep and a primer that will bond to zinc, and a standard alkyd applied straight over galvanized steel will fail.

Special coatings. Intumescent coating on exposed structural steel is priced per square foot of steel surface at a dry film thickness driven by the rating and the member, and it is an order of magnitude away from a normal interior system. It is sometimes specified as applied fireproofing in Division 07 alongside spray-applied fireproofing and sometimes as intumescent painting under high-performance coatings in Division 09. Find out which before you price it, and never assume the fireproofing sub has it.

Concrete and masonry sealing. Block filler on CMU, concrete sealers, elastomeric coatings on exterior walls. Note the line between this and epoxy flooring, which is a separate resinous flooring section and normally a separate sub.

What arrives finished. Factory-finished doors, prefinished casework, coated storefront and anodized aluminium are not yours. Say so.

Read the drawings for your sheets, not the whole set

Your scope is defined by a schedule, not by a plan.

• The room finish schedule governs. It assigns a finish or paint designation to each surface in each room, and the specification defines what that designation actually is: primer, number of coats, sheen, dry film thickness. The finish legend on a plan sheet is a summary. Where the two disagree, the schedule and the spec win.
• The reflected ceiling plan tells you which rooms have a ceiling and which are open to structure. That single distinction is the largest swing in an interior painting bid.
• The S-series gives you what is exposed in those open areas: joists, beams, and the underside of the metal decking.
• The M, E and P sheets matter when the spec says exposed services are painted out to match. Duct, conduit, hangers and sprinkler pipe in an exposed ceiling are surface area.
• The door schedule, the same one the hardware sets come off, tells you how many doors and frames are field finished and how many arrive prefinished.
• The gypsum board specification carries the drywall finish level. Read it before you price a sheen. This is covered below and it is the item that costs painters the most money.
• Every addendum. Colour schedules and finish substitutions are classic late additions.

Get the quantities right

Painting is bid in square feet of surface by substrate and by coating system, with doors and frames counted each and material derived in gallons from the manufacturer's coverage at the specified film build. Take the wall and ceiling areas off by room, tag each area with its substrate and its system, and only then convert to labour and gallons.

The obvious wall-area takeoff misses five things:

1. Coats. A system is a primer plus finish coats. Total applied area is surface area multiplied by the coat count in the spec, not the surface area. Deep and saturated colours often need an extra coat to hide over a tinted primer.
2. Substrate porosity. The same square foot of split-face block and smooth drywall are the same number on a plan and nowhere near the same in gallons or labour. Block filler on CMU is the extreme case. Pull coverage per coat from the product data at the specified thickness rather than carrying one blanket rate.
3. Exposed structure and deck. The underside of fluted deck has more surface than its plan area, the flutes have to be cut in, and spraying an open ceiling means masking everything below it. Derive your multiplier over plan area from your own completed jobs, not from a rule of thumb.
4. Doors, frames and the long tail. These are counted units, not area: doors, frames, handrails, bollards, exposed lintels, access panels. They carry labour far out of proportion to their area.
5. Height and access. Stairwells, atria and high bay areas are the same square feet at a different production rate once lifts or scaffold are involved. Price them on separate lines.

Then there is prep and back-priming, which are separate lines and not part of any coating unit price. Field-finished millwork and trim usually has to be primed on all faces before the carpenter installs it, which means a priming station and a mobilization that lands earlier in the schedule than the rest of your work.

The prep standard is half the price

On steel and on existing surfaces, the preparation standard is the line item, and the spec states it by reference. Solvent cleaning, hand tool cleaning, power tool cleaning, commercial blast and near-white blast (the SSPC surface preparation standards, now published under AMPP) are not adjacent prices. Blasting brings containment, disposal and a different crew.

Three practitioner items in the same territory:

• Shop primer has a recoat window. Steel that sat in a yard through a winter is not a primed surface you can top coat, it is a surface that needs prep. Say what condition you assumed.
• Curing compounds block adhesion. A membrane-forming curing compound on a slab or a form release on a wall will stop a sealer or coating bonding. Removing it is prep, and it is frequently nobody's scope until it becomes yours.
• Do not paint sprinkler heads. Overspray on heads means the heads get replaced, and the backcharge lands on the painter. Masking in exposed ceilings is a real cost.

The gotcha that costs painting subs the most money is not any of those. It is sheen against drywall finish level. Most commercial walls are finished to level 4 per the gypsum industry standard GA-214, which is rated for flat and eggshell. Put a semi-gloss or a dark saturated colour on a level 4 wall under raking light and the joints and fastener depressions telegraph. The fix is a level 5 finish, which belongs to the drywall sub, but the complaint arrives at the painter because the painter applied the coating that revealed it. Write the finish level you assumed into your clarifications, every time.

What the GC checks when leveling painting bids

Bid leveling is the GC normalizing every proposal to one scope. Expect them to check:

• Coat count and film thickness against the specified systems, designation by designation.
• Exposed structure and deck, in or out, and what area you carried.
• The prep standard on steel, and touch-up versus full prime and finish.
• Special coatings: intumescent, epoxy, elastomeric, block filler, concrete sealer.
• Doors and frames, field finished or factory finished, counted.
• Wall coverings and caulking, which are commonly assumed into the painting package.
• Number of colours and any allowance you carried for late selections.
• Mobilizations and punch, including who pays for damage by other trades.

Anything you leave silent gets filled in with an assumption that does not favour you.

Structure the proposal

Five parts, in this order. The number, with the systems and sections it covers. Inclusions as items. Exclusions as items. Clarifications and assumptions: drywall finish level, prep standard, condition of shop primer, colour count, number of mobilizations, access and lift availability, temperature and enclosure requirements before you can coat. Then unit prices for the likely adds, per square foot by system, per door and frame, and an hourly rate for touch-up caused by others.

Carry your markup on a cost you can defend line by line, and keep the takeoff that produced the areas.

Where this fits

Painting is the last trade on the wall, which is why the boundaries have to be written down at bid time rather than argued at punch. If you are running the takeoff itself, Ruh reads the drawing set, measures the surfaces by substrate and system, and prices the measured quantities against your own price book, with every line traceable back to the sheet it came from, which is what you need when a GC asks why your exposed-structure area is higher than the next bidder's.