Built to be checked.

Most of the time the estimate isn’t really for you. It’s for a bank, an insurer, a VvE or a court — someone who has to check the number before they’ll act on it.

That needs a different document from a builder’s email. This one explains its own terms, shows where each quantity came from, and says what’s been left out. Detailed enough that a bank can check it, plain enough that you can read it without a builder sitting next to you.

Before you buy

You’ve seen a house and the question is whether the work is worth doing at all. A ballpark before you bid tells you what you’d actually be spending — the asking price plus the building — and whether that still adds up.

For the bank

A bouwdepot is released against documents, not intentions. The bank wants a specification: what the work is, and what each part of it costs. One total on one line rarely moves it. An itemised estimate usually does.

For the insurer

Insurers don’t refuse numbers for being too high. They refuse numbers they can’t follow. What they want to see is how the amount was reached — the work, the quantities, the rates, labour separated from materials, and what the price does and doesn’t include written down rather than assumed.

That’s a different document from a contractor’s quote, and it’s the one I write. I can’t promise an insurer will accept it. What I can do is give you something they have to argue with instead of dismiss.

When it goes wrong

The contractor left, or the work is bad, and you need to know what putting it right will cost. If it reaches a lawyer or a court, the side that brings a properly built number is usually the side that sets it — silence from the other side doesn’t help them.

Is this quote fair?

Sometimes you only want to know whether the price in front of you is normal. I’ll price the same job independently and show you where the difference sits.

The gap is usually not in the rates. It’s in what the quote doesn’t mention. You ask for a parquet floor and you’re quoted for a parquet floor — nothing about the subfloor underneath it, which has to be sorted before anything gets laid. That work doesn’t disappear. It arrives later, when you can’t change contractor.

A cheap quote and a complete quote aren’t the same thing, and the difference only shows up when it’s too late to act on it. If the quote in front of you is fair, I’ll tell you that too.

what to send, how long, what it costs →

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