where to start with costing spreadsheet for house renovations?

[Honesttodog]

I love a bit of stationery and am forever writing lists, buying note pads etc.
BUT we are about to go to tender for work on our house and I will have to start building a detailed costing of items that will need to be bought. It will pretty much be me doing all the research/comparing of costs etc.

What program should I use? I have ipad and iphone so would rather work on that, but suspect it would be best to use something that will work across (non-mac) laptop, ipad and iphone.

How to break it down? Room by room, then walls/ceiling/electrics/furniture/floor? Or just plug it all in as a basic list then refine later?

I am a perfectionist so tend to like everything categorized and organised, but also need to get cracking rather than faffing about with subheadings....

Any tips or websites or apps you can suggest?

I will also be feeding in quotes from companies.

Did you all keep ring binders or box files of quotes/prices from shops to refer to? I see a new paper mountain looming....

Bump

I have a big lever arch with everything in (itsw a bit dusty now being 7 years old)
and I did a spreadsheet with columns for labour, materials and fees and a memo sheet for quotes

and the daily snagging sheets are all stored somewhere

I used excel. A row for each sub category. E.g.wall tiles- row each for bath, en suite, kitchen etc. Columns: Estimated (costs from hours of research) Actual (the actual column was the estimated column overwritten by actual costs as they occurred so you had an idea of final likely cost). Balance. All totalled at bottom. Over costs in red. Aim being to keep the total difference between estimated and actual to a minimum. Hours of fun.

Don't forget to add delivery costs. They mount up. As does door furniture. ... That lovely handle at £100 is fine. But multiplied by 10 doors is not so fine. Plus 10 latches, 10 pairs of hinges.... (Shuffles off muttering about door furniture )

I use a Google docs spreadsheet so I can access from my phone, tablet, PC at work and so can DH - being able to dump numbers into a spreadsheet is great. Oh and keep (or evernote) for photos and annotations from my phone - which I eventually link back to the Google document spreadsheet.

Ok google doc sounds good but never used. Will check it out.

Good point about delivery costs and already feeling pain re: doors and door handles, our door are all stripped and Grubby, not sure whether to change them for painted or not...don't even get me started on the Handle Hunt.

I use Google docs for ours so that I can share it with my husband (not that he looks at it!) and access it at home, at work or on my phone.

I have mine set up with a few different tabs:

• Pricing tab - I split it into construction costs, fees, "client supply" items like kitchen, bathroom suites, tiles, the infamous door handles etc, then I also added all of the decorative elements such as curtains, curtain poles etc. I put in estimates for all of these, then I over type them when they are confirmed and put comments so I know what has been paid.
• Invoice tab - just keep a running total of every payment I make related to the project so I can cross reference what has been paid for. Also helps with things that I'm paying for in several installments so I can see where I'm up to.
• Balance checker - I have one tab that tallies the total invoices so far against the estimated final cost of the project and makes sure I still have enough money in the bank (or planned savings) to pay for it all!

I'm a bit obsessive about this all too - one thing I found enormously helpful was setting down every single aspect of the project on the pricing tab and going over and over every detail to try and get a realistic estimate in, before we even started the project.

It did end up being way higher than our original plan for the project, but we knew this before we'd signed a contract with the builder, so we were able to make an informed decision, not to mention helping us refinance the house to the correct amount. We haven't really strayed too much from this revised budget during the build. It did help that we had a contingency of 10% of the construction budget put to one side - helped enormously when, inevitably, things did come up.