Variations
The architect says it was included. Was it?
This argument feels like a matter of opinion and is actually a matter of documents. Your price included what the priced documents described, no more and no less, and the answer to almost every included-or-extra fight is sitting in the revision box of a drawing.
QScope Team·9 February 2026·5 min read
“That was obviously included.” Four words, usually delivered with confidence, usually about something that is nowhere on any drawing you priced.
What “included” actually means
Your price included the work described in the documents the price was built on: the drawings at their stated revisions, the specification, the bill or schedule of works your contract lists. Not what anyone assumed, not what a competent builder might have foreseen in general, and not what the finished building obviously needs. If it is not in the priced documents, it is extra, however necessary it is.
The honest edge of that: where your contract puts design responsibility on you, the line moves, because you priced an outcome rather than a drawing. That situation has its own page.
The ten-minute check
1. Find the contract’s list of documents, with drawing numbers and revisions. This list is the whole battlefield.
2. Open the revision that is on the list, not the latest one. If the disputed work first appears at revision C and you priced revision B, that is the argument over.
3. Check the spec and the bill for words that catch it. A one-line item like “allow for making good” can genuinely include things a drawing does not show, which is why those lines deserve suspicion at pricing time.
How to make this argument impossible on the next job
- List the documents your price is built on, in the quote itself, with revisions. One paragraph.
- Write the exclusions down. “Excludes works below ground beyond detail on drawing 104 rev B” is a sentence that earns its keep for a year. This is practice, not law, and it is the cheapest clause you will ever write. See what belongs in a quote.
- When the drawings move, say so in writing the week it happens, not at the account: “revision D adds the parapet detail; this is additional to our price and we will confirm the cost effect.”
On a domestic job, the same
Nothing here depends on the Construction Act. On an extension for the family living in the house the documents are usually thinner, which makes the exclusions paragraph in your own quote more important, not less: it may be the only scope document that exists.
What to do this week
1. For the current dispute, do the ten-minute check before you reply. Answer with drawing numbers and revisions, not with adjectives.
2. If it is extra, treat it as a variation from this moment: instruction confirmed, price built on the ladder, into the next valuation.