What an industrial building repaint costs in Cape Town, and what actually drives the number

You send the same warehouse to three contractors and the numbers come back so far apart that you assume somebody is lying. Usually nobody is. They have priced three different jobs, because nobody wrote down which job it was.

On an industrial building the coating is a small part of the money. The number is driven by four things: how you reach the work, what state the substrate is in, how much of the work has to happen when the building is not operating, and whether the water problem is being dealt with or painted over.

Notice what those rates do not include: access, and the repairs the survey has not found yet. That is deliberate. Any contractor who quotes a per square metre rate for a building they have not measured and walked is quoting a hope.

Access is charged per erection and then per period standing, not per square metre. On a double volume warehouse or a three storey office block it can be the largest single line on the quote, larger than every litre of paint combined.

• Sound, previously coated plaster that just needs a wash and two coats sits at the bottom of the range.
• Chalking, flaking or incompatible old coatings have to come off first, and that is labour, not product.
• Cracking has to be diagnosed and repaired by type. Filling every crack the same way is why they come back through the new paint.
• Hollow or delaminated plaster gets hacked off and re-rendered. Painting over it buys nothing.
• Steel that has gone past surface rust into pitting needs proper treatment, and painting over rust is money set on fire.

This is where a cheap quote hides. Preparation is invisible on handover day and decisive two winters later, so it is the first thing removed when a contractor is trying to win on price.

Out of hours work costs more per square metre than daytime work. Night shifts, weekend work and shutdown windows all carry a premium, and a quote that ignores your operating constraint has simply not planned for it. You will meet that cost later as a variation instead of now as a line item.

The most expensive industrial repaint is the one done over an unresolved leak. Coating a wall under a rusting roof, a holding box gutter or a parapet that is pushing damp inward means paying for that wall twice, and the second time you will also be paying for the stained ceiling and the damaged stock underneath it.

1. 1Get the building measured and surveyed, with photographs, before anybody quotes.
2. 2Write one scope and send the same scope to every contractor.
3. 3Require access to be a separate visible line.
4. 4Require waterproofing to be a separate visible line.
5. 5Require preparation, primer and number of coats to be named per substrate.
6. 6Ask for the programme and the shift pattern in writing, with a weather allowance.
7. 7Hold retention until the punch list is closed.

Do those seven things and the three quotes in front of you finally describe the same job. That is the point at which the cheapest one is genuinely the cheapest one.