Counting Foot Run Off the Floor Plan

What a foot run is

One foot run is one linear foot, about 305 mm, measured along the length of the piece at a standard height and depth. It is a measure of how far the carpentry goes along the wall, not of how much material is in it.

Almost every carpenter and interior firm in Singapore quotes built-in work this way rather than per cabinet or per square foot, and the convention is genuinely useful: it is quick to measure, quick to check, and it maps directly onto how the work is built.

What it hides is everything about specification. Two runs of the same length can differ by a factor of two on carcass material, door finish, hardware and internal fittings, which is why a foot run rate means nothing without the line stating what is in it.

Top and bottom are two runs

This is the single most common misunderstanding in the market, and it is worth being explicit about on the quotation rather than letting the client discover it.

Per foot run pricing normally quotes top and bottom cabinetry separately. A rate of $100 per foot run means $100 for the top run and $100 for the bottom run. A ten foot kitchen with cabinets above and below is therefore twenty foot run, not ten, and around $2,000 rather than $1,000.

None of that is a trick. It is two separate pieces of carpentry that happen to be on the same wall. But a quotation that says "kitchen carpentry, 20 ft run" with no further explanation reads to a homeowner as double the kitchen they think they have, and a quotation that says "10 ft run" and then charges for twenty reads as something worse. State both runs as their own lines and the problem disappears.

• —Bottom run: measured along the wall, floor units
• —Top run: measured separately, and it usually stops short at the hood
• —Tall units: normally their own line, at their own rate

What gets missed

Counting off the wall length is a good start and it is not the whole quantity. The pieces most often left out of a first count are the ones that are not against the main run.

An island or a peninsula is its own length, and it frequently has cabinetry on both faces. A return along a short wall is easy to forget because it does not read as part of the run. Filler panels and end panels are not foot run but they are cost. And a wardrobe with a corner unit is longer than the two wall lengths suggest, because the corner is shared and has to be resolved one way or the other.

Height changes the rate, not the quantity

A foot run rate is quoted against an assumed height. Standard HDB ceiling heights, broadly 2.6 to 2.8 m, are normally included in the rate. A condominium at 3 m or more commonly attracts a surcharge, because a tall unit to the ceiling is more carcass, more door and more work at height.

This is why the ceiling height belongs on the site measurement list rather than in somebody’s memory, and why the quotation should state the height the rate assumes. A rate quoted for a 2.6 m flat and applied to a 3.2 m apartment is a loss that is nobody’s fault and entirely yours.

Count it off a drawing, not off a photograph

The reason to trace the plan to scale before quoting is that carpentry is the largest single line in most renovation quotations and it is priced by a measurement. Once the plan is to scale, a run drawn along a wall has a length, and the length is read off rather than recalled.

It also makes the count auditable by you. Draw the runs, and the pieces that get missed when counting from memory are visibly missing from the drawing: the return, the island’s second face, the short length beside the fridge. You are checking a picture of the kitchen rather than a list of numbers.

And it makes the count auditable by the client, which is the part that wins work. A quotation that says twenty foot run and comes with a plan showing where those twenty feet are is not a number to be haggled over. It is a description of a kitchen. The mechanics of getting there are in tracing a plan to scale.

Put the length on the line

The fix for all of this is a line item that states the quantity, the unit, the height and the specification. "Kitchen bottom cabinets, 12 ft run, 700 mm high, plywood carcass, laminate finish, soft-close hinges" is a line a client can compare against another firm’s quotation and a line you can defend.

"Kitchen carpentry, lot" is neither, and it is the reason the cheapest quotation so often turns out to be the most expensive one. There is more on what a properly itemised document looks like in how to read a renovation quotation, and the rates themselves are covered in carpentry cost per foot run.