Painting and decorating · Repaints · Cyclical
You priced it standing in the hallway. Now write it up.
No drawings, no schedule, no bill of quantities. A walk round, a phone full of photographs and a rough idea in your head that has to become a document tonight. BuiltUp reads the photographs, writes the scope of works room by room, and tells you plainly which quantities it could not get from a picture.
No card. Three takeoffs on the free plan, enough to photograph a job you have already quoted and see what comes back.
How the job reaches you
Your input is a set of photographs, and the product knows what that means.
Most estimating software assumes a drawing. You rarely get one. What you get is twenty minutes in somebody's house or an empty office floor, a phone, and the understanding that the quote goes out tonight or the job goes to whoever sent theirs first.
BuiltUp has a separate mode for this, with a separate set of instructions behind it, and the instructions start by conceding the obvious: a photograph shows condition and content. It does not show you dimensions, what is behind a surface, or what is outside the frame. So it counts what can be counted, estimates only against something visible with a known size, and refuses to invent the rest. That refusal is the reason the output is worth anything.
Photograph the rooms and upload them
Up to 24 photographs a run, JPG, PNG or HEIC, 100 MB a batch. Straight off the phone. Add a sentence about what the job is if you want to steer it. A full repaint reads differently from making good after a leak.
It writes one entry per photograph
Every photograph you gave it gets its own observation, in order, saying what is actually in the shot, rating the condition good, fair, poor or defective, and listing the works that shot evidences. If a photograph shows nothing worth noting it says so rather than inventing a defect to fill the entry. Rooms are named as they appear, bathroom, rear elevation, back bedroom, and anything it cannot place is called an unidentified area and flagged as such.
Counts come back confident. Areas come back honest.
Doors, radiators, panes and windows are counted, and counting is reliable, so those are graded HIGH. Where it estimates, it estimates against something visible with a known size: a door leaf is about 0.8 m wide, a standard ceiling is about 2.4 m. It names the reference in the notes and caps itself at MEDIUM. Everything else comes back as one item with "quantity to be confirmed on site" written against it. It will not produce a wall area schedule from ordinary site photographs, and it is told not to try.
It hands you the list of measurements to go and take
This is the part that makes photograph pricing usable. Alongside the scope it returns the measurements it needs, each phrased as a question you could ask a person on site, "total wall area to the front bedroom", in m², with the value it assumed in the meantime and a note saying which quantities that assumption is driving. Take the tape to those and the estimate firms up. You are not re-measuring the job, you are measuring the six things it flagged.
Describe the rooms, or hand over the photographs from the walk round, and the scope is written against your own materials and day rates. What a picture cannot give it comes back named rather than invented.
What a decorating scope actually contains.
These are the items the walk produces on residential and housing work. On a small making-good visit expect a handful of rows, not fifty. It is instructed that padding the list destroys the trust of whoever reads it.
- Mist coat plus two coats, walls and ceilings, area by room
- Patch plaster to area, re-skim wall or ceiling before decoration
- Renew coving, skirting and architrave where they are being replaced
- Mould wash and anti-fungal treatment, area per room
- Stain block and redecoration to treated areas
- Wall coverings by area, and preparation to previously papered walls
- External cyclical decoration, by elevation
- Voids decoration, full or partial re-decoration by room
- Protection: dust sheets, dust screens, floor protection in an occupied property
- Access: step ladders, tower scaffold, mobile access or full scaffold, each with a duration
- Tenant liaison and appointment allowance on occupied housing work
- Waste removal and tip runs, by number of loads
On social housing work every row is required to open with a repair priority, EMERGENCY, URGENT or ROUTINE, because a repair line without one is not an orderable works-order line. Items likely to be tenant damage rather than fair wear and tear are noted as such, since it changes who is recharged.
The three that matter to a decorator.
You are not buying a construction platform. You are buying a way to get a defensible document out the same evening.
- A day rate that knows where you are
- Painter and decorator is one of the 27 trades that ship as UK day rates, at a low, mid and high figure, across twelve regions including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with a regional index applied. The region comes off your postcode. Load it in one click and your first estimate has a real number behind it; edit it to your own rate and it is never overwritten again.
- Labour always reads as time
- A trade returned as a lump sum is converted into the days that money buys, with per-trade minimum durations, so you can hold the price against how long you actually think it will take. On decorating that is the whole check, if the maths says one and a half days for a three-bedroom repaint, you know before the client does.
- Asbestos is never priced
- On pre-2000 stock, textured coatings, floor tiles, insulating board and cement sheet are flagged as requiring a refurbishment and demolition survey and raised as an open question. It will not put a price against disturbing any of them. Artex on a ceiling you were about to skim is exactly the item this exists for.
What it will not do for you.
- It will not give you m² from a photograph.
- This is the honest headline for this trade and it is worth repeating. Areas need a plan, a tape or a laser. What it will do is tell you exactly which areas it needs and what it assumed while it waited, which is a materially different thing from quietly guessing.
- It cannot see behind the wall.
- It is instructed to separate the symptom from the cause: a stained ceiling is a symptom, and the roof, the seal or the pipe above is the cause. It will price the making good you can see and raise investigating the cause as an open question. It will never price a repair to something it has inferred.
- It does not do colour matching, or specify a product.
- It will price a coat. It will not tell you which manufacturer's system to use on a previously oil-bound distempered ceiling. Your material catalogue carries the products you actually buy.
- Three takeoffs on the free plan, in total.
- Not three a month. Three ever, and three AI estimates in a separate allowance. That is deliberately enough to photograph a job you have already quoted and reprice it twice, which is the only useful first test.
Questions this comes with.
- I mostly work for housing associations on a repaint contract. Does it know that language?
- Yes, and it is a different mode. On social housing work it produces one row per orderable repair, using the verb-first wording a schedule of rates uses, renew, ease and adjust, mould wash and stain block to bathroom ceiling, so a supervisor can match it against their own codes quickly. Every row carries a repair priority. If your contract is bound to an imported schedule, lines come back carrying codes that have been checked against it.
- Do I have to load a rate book before it is any use?
- No. Painter and decorator day rates for your region load with one button, and there is a starter set of common materials. The first estimate has real figures behind it before you have typed anything. Everything you replace with your own rate makes more of it yours and none of your edits are ever overwritten.
- Can I do all this on my phone?
- The photographs, yes, that is the point of the mode. There are iOS and Android apps carrying most of the project screens including takeoff, scope, quotes, changes, orders and billing. RAMS and evidence packs are on the dashboard only.
Photograph a job you have already quoted.
You know what you charged. See what comes back, and read what it says it could not measure.
No card. Three takeoffs and three AI estimates, both lifetime totals.
Or set it up with us, 30 minutes, screen-shared