What a BOQ line actually is
Before anyone buys a thing, Mostafa — the studio’s quantity surveyor — turns Salma’s drawings into a bill of quantities. This is what the whole job is priced against.
A BOQ line is not a guess. It is a measured quantity — square metres of flooring, linear metres of skirting — set against an agreed rate per unit.
Open the Twin Villas finishes bill and you see the trade the same way the site sees it: each material, how much of it, what it costs a unit, and what the line comes to.
Read down the lines and you are reading the job. Smoked oak flooring by the square metre, gypsum ceiling by the sheet, the joinery that carries a carpenter’s labour inside it.
Quantity times rate is the amount, and the amount is what you will be held to when it is bought and when it is valued.
Down at the totals bar, every line rolls up into one figure in pounds. That is the budget the job is being run against — the number Dina signed, drawn from these very lines.
The cost of getting this wrong is concrete: under-measure the oak and the studio pays the shortfall out of its own margin. Over-measure and material is ordered that nobody can return.
Build the bill from the current revision of the drawings, not the one before. A BOQ priced against a superseded drawing is how fit-out firms lose money they never find.
The habit that matters
One habit worth building: every quantity on this list should be traceable to a measured take-off from the drawing. If a number cannot be defended, it is not a quantity — it is a hope.
What just happened
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What a BOQ line actually is
Before anyone buys a thing, Mostafa — the studio’s quantity surveyor — turns Salma’s drawings into a bill of quantities. This is what the whole job is priced against.
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The habit that matters
One habit worth building: every quantity on this list should be traceable to a measured take-off from the drawing. If a number cannot be defended, it is not a quantity — it is a hope.
Open the BOQ Opens Taskity in your own project.