What a scope of work for a kitchen and bath remodel should contain

Why three quotes do not compare without one

Three bidders walk the same kitchen on three different days and hear three different descriptions of the job, because you told it three times and nobody tells it the same way twice. Each of them then prices what they heard, plus what their own experience tells them is normally included, minus what they assume somebody else is doing.

What comes back is three numbers for three different projects. The gaps between them are not a measure of who is expensive. They are a measure of how much each bidder decided to include, and no amount of staring at the totals will tell you which is which.

What makes three quotes comparable is not a format. It is that they describe the same work.

A scope of work fixes that by moving the description out of six separate conversations and into one document that everybody prices. It is the cheapest hour in the whole project, and it is the only one that has to happen before the quotes rather than after them.

Who writes the scope of work, you or the bidders

The homeowner issues the scope of work. That is the whole point of it. A scope written by one bidder describes the job that bidder intends to do, which is useful to that bidder and to nobody else, and it cannot be handed to the other two without handing them one company approach to the job.

Issuing it yourself does not require you to know how the work is done. It requires you to state what is being changed, what is staying, what you are supplying, what you have already decided and what you have not. The bidders supply the method, the sequence and the price. That division is the correct one, and it is also the one that stops you from telling a licensed trade how to do their own work.

Send the same version to every bidder on the same day, and tell each of them that you have done so. Then ask each of them to price it line by line, to keep your line numbers, and to write an exclusion on the line rather than deleting the line. A quote that keeps your numbering can be read against the other two in an afternoon.

What goes in it, section by section

A scope of work for a kitchen and bath remodel splits into the project pages, the trade sections and the pages that catch what the trades leave out. The list below is the shape of the document, and every line in it is something a bidder would otherwise price as an assumption.

The supply and install table, and why it decides most of the difference

One table in a scope of work causes more mismatched quotes than every other page combined: the one that says, item by item, who supplies it and who installs it. Cabinets, countertops, appliances, plumbing fixtures, faucets and trim, tile and stone, lighting fixtures, hardware, flooring. Two words per row, owner or contractor, in two columns.

Leave it blank and each bidder fills it in silently with their own habit. One carries the appliances, one assumes you are buying them, and the difference between those two quotes has nothing to do with either business and everything to do with a table nobody filled in.

The second column matters as much as the first. Owner supplied and contractor installed is a common and perfectly normal arrangement, and it is also the arrangement where the question of who is responsible when the wrong thing arrives has to be asked out loud before anybody orders anything.

Site conditions, the part bidders price as a guess when you leave it out

Site conditions are the things about your house that change the price of identical work. What floor the job is on, whether there is an elevator, where a truck can park, where a dumpster can stand, what hours a building allows, what is under the existing floor, where the water shutoff and the electrical panel are, and whether you are living there while it happens.

A bidder who is not told these things does one of two things, and both of them cost you. Either they price an assumption, in which case the assumption becomes a change order on the first morning, or they carry a cushion for the unknown, in which case you are paying for the cushion in every quote and cannot see it.

Hazardous materials sit in this section and are handled differently. In a house of a certain age, what has been tested for is a question with a real answer. Say what you know, say what has been tested, and let each bidder price their own approach to it. This is not a question a planning document answers.

Allowances belong to you, not to the bidder

An allowance is a placeholder for something you have not chosen yet. Tile, plumbing fixtures, faucets and trim, lighting, cabinet hardware, countertop by the square foot, appliances, flooring. Every kitchen and bath project has several, because nobody has chosen everything at the moment the quotes go out.

An allowance only makes quotes comparable if every bidder carries the same one, which is why the number is set in your document and not in theirs. Three bidders left to invent their own allowances produce three quotes with three different hidden decisions inside them, and the cheapest one is usually just the one that guessed lowest.

Ask about every allowance: what exactly does this buy, by product and by name, and what happens to the price if I choose something else. A bidder who answers that clearly has told you something about the whole job.

Ask for a unit price alongside each allowance as well. A unit price for one more outlet, one more fixture rough in, or a square foot of tile is what turns a later decision into arithmetic rather than a negotiation.

Exclusions and assumptions, written once so all three assume the same things

Every bidder makes assumptions. Writing yours down once means all three make the same ones, and the list is short enough to read in a minute.

• Work happens within the hours stated in the site conditions.
• The owner is responsible for choices, by the dates the schedule needs them.
• Anything supplied by the owner is on site before the trade that installs it starts.
• Existing services are assumed to be where they appear, and anything found otherwise is raised as a question before the work continues.
• Rooms not in scope are not part of the work, other than protection and making good.

The exclusions are the mirror image: permits and permit fees unless the project pages say otherwise, engineering and any professional fee, testing or handling of hazardous materials, work outside the rooms in scope, and anything not shown on the drawings issued with the document.

Model code figure, verify locally. Permits are the exclusion that most often turns out to matter. Whether a permit is needed for your work, who may apply for it and what it costs are decided by your own building department, and the answer differs by state and often by city. Say on the document who is applying, and verify locally rather than taking the answer from a quote.

Unforeseen conditions belong on the exclusions page, and they are a process rather than a number. No bidder can price what nobody has seen behind a wall. What you are asking for is an agreement that anything unforeseen stops, gets described in writing, and gets priced before it is worked on. That request costs nothing and it is the difference between a surprise and a decision.

What a scope of work is not

A scope of work is not a contract. It contains no terms, it says nothing about payment, nothing about warranty periods, nothing about what happens if either side walks away, and it is not a document anybody signs as an agreement. Your agreement is a separate document, and it is written by people qualified to write it in the state where the work is happening.

It is not a bid form either, and it does not tell a trade how to do their work. The electrician decides how the circuits are run and carries the license that says so. The scope says which outlets you want and where, which is a different sentence entirely.

It also does not decide who you hire. It makes three quotes readable against each other, and everything after that is judgment: the references, the register check, the questions about how the business runs, and the answers you got when you asked the awkward ones.