Phaelariax Vylorn
Three quotes are sitting on your desk for the same building: 40,000 square feet of warehouse, plus the front offices and two stairwells. They come in at $52,000, $47,000 and $38,000.
The low one is a page and a half. It says “prep and paint all surfaces as required, two coats, premium paint.” The other two run to five or six pages. Your first instinct is that somebody is padding. Usually the truth is duller than that: you’ve been handed three quotes for three different jobs, and only one of them describes the work your building actually needs.
They Didn’t Measure the Same Thing
Ask each bidder what square footage the number is built on. Some price off floor area because it’s fast. Others measure actual wall and deck surface, which in a warehouse with 8-metre clear height is a wildly different figure.
Neither method is dishonest by itself. But if one bidder priced 40,000 square feet of floor and another priced closer to 100,000 square feet of coated surface, comparing the totals tells you nothing at all. Get measured surface areas in writing and the three numbers start to mean something.
The same goes for what’s included in the count. Are the deck and joists in the price or is this walls only? Do the stairwells include the underside of the landings? Are doors and frames counted as units or rolled into the wall rate? Those omissions are where a lean-looking bid finds its room.
“Prep as Required” Is the Most Expensive Phrase in the Document
Required by whom, exactly? Prep is the bulk of the labour on most commercial repaints, and it’s the easiest thing to quietly skip, because the evidence vanishes under the first coat.
A serious scope names it. What gets patched, what gets sanded, what gets degreased, how much caulking is carried in the price and what happens when there turns out to be more. It should also say what’s excluded. An honest exclusion list is the mark of somebody who has done this before, not somebody hedging.
Name the Product, Not the Adjective
“Premium paint” isn’t a product. The scope should carry the manufacturer, the specific product line and, ideally, the target dry film build per coat.
This matters most on the surfaces that take abuse. A contractor can satisfy a “two coats of premium paint” clause with a builder-grade wall paint and technically deliver what you signed. Six months of janitorial scrubbing later you find out what you bought. Writing the product code into the scope takes thirty seconds and ends the argument before it starts.
Everything That Isn’t Paint
On commercial work the coating is often the smallest line on the sheet. Access equipment is not. A deck at 8 metres means scissor lifts, and lifts mean rental, delivery, trained operators and aisles cleared so they can move.
Then comes protection: masking racking, covering product, poly containment to keep overspray off inventory, plus waste handling and the cost of working when the building isn’t running. A bid with no after-hours allowance isn’t cheaper. It’s a bid that quietly assumes it gets your warehouse at ten o’clock on a Tuesday, and you’ll find out about that assumption at the worst possible moment.
So price the hours you actually intend to hand over. Painters who work around live operations — property management portfolios, multi-family buildings, municipal facilities, the sort of mixed book Imagine Painting runs out of Calgary — will quote evenings and weekends as a visible line rather than a surprise you absorb later.
The Paperwork You Should See Before You Sign
A certificate of insurance naming your organization, a WCB clearance letter, and confirmation that anyone going up in a lift is trained to run it. In Alberta, workers’ compensation coverage isn’t a nicety, and a clearance letter takes a legitimate contractor about a minute to produce.
If a bidder treats that request as friction, you’ve learned something useful at no cost.
Payment Terms Are Part of the Price
Alberta changed how construction money moves. Under the province’s prompt payment rules for the construction industry, an owner generally has 28 calendar days from a proper invoice to pay it, and 14 calendar days to issue a notice of dispute if something’s wrong. Contractors then have 7 calendar days to pay their subtrades once they’ve been paid.
Those clocks land on your desk, not just theirs. If your internal approval chain takes five weeks, you want to know that before the first invoice arrives. And a contractor who can explain the rules without checking is a contractor with a working back office, which predicts an on-time finish better than anything said in the sales meeting.
Where the Savings Actually Went
That $9,000 gap almost always resolves into the same short list: fewer prep hours, a cheaper coating, no after-hours allowance, and no contingency for surfaces that turn out worse than they looked from the floor.
None of those costs disappear. They get handed back to you as change orders, as a schedule that runs into your busy season, or as a repaint two years earlier than the one you budgeted for. The cheap bid is rarely a discount. It’s an invoice you haven’t received yet.
