Concrete Estimating Services for Contractors Across Canada

So we measure formwork the way it actually gets built, in square feet of contact area. Every surface the form touches gets counted. A 300 mm wall and a 600 mm wall running the same length need nearly identical formwork and very different concrete. Price them off volume alone and you've underbid the thin one and overbid the thick one.

Contact area also tells you something volume never will: how many times a crew handles the same panel. A tight stair core with six lifts and a lot of blockouts burns hours that a long straight foundation wall of the same area never touches.

Repetition is the other half of it. A parkade with forty matching columns is cheap per column once the first one is up. Forty columns at forty different dimensions is a different job entirely, even though a volume takeoff would show roughly the same concrete. We count the repeats, because that's what tells you whether your crew is cycling or starting over every morning.

On a lot of Canadian jobs, reinforcing is supplied and placed by a separate trade. On plenty of others it sits with the concrete sub. Same set of drawings, completely different bid.

So we ask before we start, then quantify rebar either way and keep it on its own tab. If it's yours, it's priced in. If it isn't, you still have the weights in hand for checking the rebar sub's number when their quote lands the afternoon of the bid.

Worth saying plainly, because it costs people money: lap lengths aren't a rounding error. On a heavily reinforced wall or a mat slab they add real tonnage, and an estimate that skips them reads low right up until the bar arrives and you're short. We take laps off the drawings and the schedule rather than applying a blanket allowance.

For jobs where reinforcing is the main event, our rebar estimating services go deeper, including bar bending schedules and placing labour. Structural steel interfaces, embeds and base plates tie back to our steel estimating.

Some of those carry their own headaches and we price them accordingly. Post-tensioned work brings tendon layout, stressing and grouting that a conventional deck never sees. Tilt-up shifts most of the forming to casting beds on the slab. Architectural concrete raises the bar on form quality, because anything that will be looked at needs forms a client will accept.

A residential foundation package is mostly strip footings, walls and a basement slab. A high-rise core is a cycle: the same forms, the same crew, the same lift, over and over, where shaving hours off one floor multiplies across thirty. We estimate concrete on commercial, residential, industrial and civil projects, and the takeoff reflects which one you're actually building. Concrete sits in Division 03 if you're organising the bid by division, and our CSI MasterFormat guide sets out how the divisions break down.