Plastering & stucco (Stuckateur)
Plaster goes on in a few days; the scaffold stands for weeks. You pay for every day — including the one when the weather kept you off the wall.
How it is billed
Interior and exterior plaster go by the square metre, corners, beads and profiles by the running metre, cornices and stucco by the piece or the running metre, mesh and priming by the square metre. The scaffold is an item of its own — erection, standing days and dismantling separately, not a surcharge on the price per metre. How openings are counted belongs in the quote before anyone goes near the wall: it is one of the few things where the argument only breaks out at the final account. Areas and volumes are worked out in the program itself: you enter the dimensions wall by wall and elevation by elevation, name every measurement your own way, and the total goes into the quote as a finished item with the breakdown — you can see where the figure came from. The program does not deduct openings; that stays with you.
What disappears on paper
What disappears is the weather. External plaster goes on neither in frost nor in full sun on a hot wall — and the scaffold stands and counts days whether you work or not. Preparing the substrate disappears: knocking off loose plaster, priming, mesh at the material joints, making good behind the electrician and the plumber. Protection disappears: film on the windows, covering the floors, clearing up after yourself. Every one of these is obvious on site and invisible in a quote that holds a single word: „plastering".
Work it out yourself
Take the last elevation. Count the days the scaffold stood and subtract the ones you actually worked. Multiply the rest by the daily hire — you know that figure to the euro. Add the hours for preparing the substrate that the quote never held. Multiply by the number of elevations in a year. That is what an item costs when nobody writes it down because „it is included anyway".
Five minutes a day
A photo of the wall before plastering — it shows the state of the substrate, the mesh, the material joints and the places other crews left behind. In the evening: hours, material used, the scaffold day. When a crack shows up six months later and somebody asks whether the substrate was prepared, the dated photo answers for you. It works the other way too: if the crew before you left a mess, you have it on the picture before you cover it up.
What the program watches for you
When you work for a construction company, the program sets the reverse charge under §13b and watches the §48b certificate — without it your client must withhold fifteen per cent. It watches the instalment invoices: on an elevation running for weeks they keep you liquid. It watches the warranty periods — under a VOB/B contract it will not accept less than four years, under a works contract governed by the German civil code less than five. Additional work is kept as a variation with the date it was announced — with plaster it comes up especially often, because walls never look the way the drawing said.
At the end of the year
Material, scaffold hire, paid hours, kilometres — all recorded against the jobs. The annual accounts and the VAT returns read finished figures, and invoices under the reverse charge land in the right boxes by themselves.
What matters is entering things regularly — scaffold days noted as they pass show what the elevation really cost.
