Renovation cost estimate from your room sizes

An online tool for estimating a renovation. It takes your room sizes and works out exactly what an eyeballed take-off gets wrong: wall area with doors and windows subtracted, floor and ceiling area, and the skirting run around the perimeter. Each job carries standard man-hours and the list of operations it contains, taken from the published construction norm base FSNB-2022 — the same reference used to price state construction. Unit prices are yours to enter: your own, or the ones written in the quote you received.

How to build the estimate

Describe the flat

Take a ready set of rooms or add your own: length, width, height, number of doors and windows. Areas update as you type.

Tick the works

Go through the sections — strip-out, walls, ceilings, floors, doors, services — and tick what is being done. Quantities fill themselves in.

Enter the prices

Per unit of labour and, if you need it, per unit of material. Your own prices to budget; the quoted ones to check the quote.

Compare hours and print

See how many working days the scope should take by the norms, then print the estimate or export it to CSV.

Work out the quantities and check the quote you were sent

Rooms

Sizes in metres. Openings are subtracted from the wall area — nobody paints or papers a doorway, yet an eyeballed take-off almost never takes them out.

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Floor and ceiling

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Walls minus openings

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Ceiling

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Skirting run

Opening sizes

Door width

Door height

Window width

Window height

A standard door is 0.9 × 2.1 m, a window 1.4 × 1.5 m. Change them if yours differ and the wall area is recalculated.

Works

Tick what you are doing. Quantities come from the room sizes and can be overridden. Unit prices are yours to enter — your own, or the ones from the contractor quote.

WorkQty Labour, per unitMaterial, per unitAmount

Loading the works catalogue…

If a job is not in the list, add your own: name, unit and price. It carries no norm, but counts in the estimate exactly like the catalogue ones.

Total

The standard hours show how long this quantity of work is meant to take. If a crew promises twice as fast, or drags on twice as long, there is something to ask about.

Currency

Contingency

People in the crew

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Labour

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Materials

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Total with contingency

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Standard hours

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Working days for the crew

The full set of norms lives in the repair norms reference.

What the tool does

Quantities from room sizes

Wall area is the perimeter times the height minus openings; floor and ceiling come from length and width; skirting follows the perimeter without doorways. Every line of the estimate rests on these numbers.

Standard man-hours

23 of the 30 jobs carry labour hours and a norm reference. The total converts into working days for a crew of the size you set, on an eight-hour day.

The whole scope of a job

One tap shows what the norm already contains — priming, grouting, mixing. A separate charge for an operation already inside the norm is worth a question.

Checking someone else’s quote

Put in the prices from the quote and compare the quantities: a ten-square-metre gap in wall area is common, and it costs about as much as another room.

Print and export

Print the estimate on one page or export it to CSV for a spreadsheet, with the norm reference on every line.

Honest where no norm exists

Seven jobs — stretch ceilings, floor tiling, electrical points — have no matching norm in the base, and the tool says so instead of filling in a plausible number.

Questions about renovation estimates

Why does the tool not fill in prices?

Because an honest average does not exist: the rate for a square metre of plastering differs several times over between a capital city, a regional town and a village, and it moves faster than any reference can be updated. A filled-in number would look like a calculation while remaining a guess. Quantities and standard hours can be computed exactly — so those are what the tool computes.

Where do the man-hours come from?

From FSNB-2022, the federal construction norm base published as open data by the Russian Ministry of Construction. Each norm is converted to your unit: if the base states labour per 100 m², one square metre gets a hundredth of it.

Can I check a quote a contractor sent me?

That is what the tool is for. Enter your room sizes, tick the same jobs and put in the prices from the quote. The gap usually sits in two places: wall area counted without subtracting doors and windows, and operations billed as separate lines while the norm already includes them — visible under “What the job includes”.

Why do some jobs show no hours?

The selection of norms has no matching entry for stretch ceilings, floor tiling, electrical points and a few others. Substituting a norm that merely sounds similar would be a swap: it has a different scope and different labour. Those lines are marked and stay out of the hours total.

How accurate are the standard hours?

Norms describe typical conditions and work done by the book. The real schedule depends on the state of the property, access, and how many people work at once. The point of these hours is not to predict a date but to expose a gap of several times over: “a week to paint one ceiling”, or “a whole flat in three days”.

Is the estimate saved?

Rooms, ticked works and entered prices stay in this browser, so you can close the page and come back. To pass the estimate on, export it to CSV or print it.

💡 Want us to improve this tool just for you?

We can! Just send us a quick message with your idea. If you'd like to discuss it in detail, leave your email and we'll get back to you. You can stay anonymous.

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Who is this tool for?

🔌 Electronics Enthusiasts

Published 03 Sep 2026 Author: The Supreme