Category 02
Measurement and BIM take-off
NRM2, bills of quantities, model based take-off and the audit trail behind a defensible number.
Who owns the quantities on your project
Measurement looks like a technical exercise, so it gets treated as one. In fact the question of whose quantities govern decides who carries the risk...
Measuring an existing building before you price it
You can measure a new building from drawings because the drawings are the building. An existing building has to be measured from itself, and the...
Schedule of works or bill of quantities
Both documents get a contractor to a price. What separates them is what happens afterwards, when something has to be valued.
The pricing document you will need later
The pricing document stops being a tender document the day the contract is signed. From then on it is the instrument every change is valued against.
What a surveyor needs from the design team
A cost plan is a measurement of a design. Where the design is not there, the surveyor either asks, assumes, or produces a figure that means nothing....
Remeasurement contracts and where they bite
A remeasurable contract gives you competitive rates and no fixed price. That is sometimes exactly right and frequently misunderstood.
What a bill of quantities is actually for
Bills of quantities are described as old fashioned by people who have never had to value a variation without one.
Measuring from an incomplete drawing set
Every measurement from an unfinished design contains assumptions. The only question is whether the reader can see them.
Checking a contractor's quantities at tender
On design and build the contractor measures their own work. That does not mean the client has nothing to check.
Builder's work in connection, the forgotten measure
It appears on no drawing, sits in no model, and has to be done on every project. That combination makes it the most reliable omission in construction cost.
Provisional sums, defined and undefined
Two provisional sums of identical value can have entirely different consequences, and the difference is a single word in the bill.
BIM quantity take-off, what the model does not contain
Model based measurement is faster and more consistent than manual take-off. It is also confidently wrong in ways that manual measurement rarely is.
NRM2 explained for developers
Most developers never read a measurement standard and have no reason to. Understanding what it does is another matter, because it decides what your...