Counting board feet from the sheets you hang
Board feet are the sheet faces you hang, not the floor area of the room. Count sheets by size, multiply, and add them up. The example basement is 62 regular 4x12 sheets, 8 fire-rated 4x12s by the mechanical room and 4 moisture-resistant 4x8s, which is 3,488 board ft.
Use the real wall heights, not the plans. A basement with 8 ft 6 in walls needs a rip strip on every wall, and that cut, carried, screwed and taped strip is labour the plan never shows. Count it as board feet and give it hours.
Hang, tape, three coats and sand: hours per 100 board feet
The labour box reads 0.0224 crew hours a board foot, which is easier to think about as 2.24 hours per 100 board feet. That covers checking backing, hanging ceilings and walls, corner bead and tape, three coats, sanding with dust control and the touch-up walk. It also covers each trip to the site, because a three-coat finish means coming back on several days.
The finish level moves this number most. If a skim coat over everything lifts it to 0.028, the basement goes from $8,038.73 to $9,363.05, or $2.68 a board foot. Bid a smoother finish at the standard number and you put on that coat for nothing.
A 500 board ft room next to the 3,488 board ft basement
Board delivery, the dump fee and the mud, blades and screws you use up total $260 and come with every job. Small rooms carry them over fewer feet:
| Job | Crew hours | Bid | Per board ft |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 board ft patch | 2.24 | $515.84 | $5.16 |
| 500 board ft room | 11.2 | $1,404.02 | $2.81 |
| 1,200 board ft addition | 26.88 | $2,958.34 | $2.47 |
| 3,488 board ft basement, example | 78.13 | $8,038.73 | $2.30 |
A patch still means a drive, unloading tools and three return trips for coats. On a real patch, drop the delivery box, raise the hours, and watch the $400 minimum.
What the drywall spreadsheet adds to reach $9,646
Those bids all lean on $60 an hour, the example hang-and-tape shop's break-even. A two-person shop with one truck will land somewhere else, so get your number from the break-even hourly rate tool. At 13% profit on cost the example keeps a thin margin, which the markup vs margin guide explains.
The spreadsheet then charges the truck, lift, stilts and sander by their running hours, adds waste on board, a small cushion, the time spent on the estimate and protecting the floors, and lists each material from a price list. It prints a customer quote with your terms on bad framing and other trades' damage, and logs whether the job made money. That is why its version of the basement is $9,646 instead of $8,038.73. The drywall pricing guide walks through that bid.