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Where Artistry Begins
Most decorative plasterers do not fail on the wall; they fail on the number. The craft takes years, but the pricing habits that let it pay can be learned in an afternoon. This is the framework we teach on the Advanced Course, in brief.
Square-metre rates borrowed from flat plastering are how decorative work gets undersold, because they hide the thing you are actually selling: skilled days. Build every quote from the days the job truly takes, at a day rate that reflects your level, plus materials with a proper margin and preparation counted as work, not as warm-up. A mirror-polished grassello wall may carry five visits between preparation, coats, burnish and wax. If the number does not contain them all, you are paying for the client's wall.
A hand-trowelled sample board is skilled work and materials, and it is also where the client's decision is genuinely made. Charge a fair sampling fee and credit it against the job when they proceed. This one habit filters the sightseers from the serious, values your bench time, and starts every project with the client already invested.
The quote should say what the price contains: the preparation included, the number of coats, whose material and tint, the protection system, and sign-off against the agreed sample board. This is not bureaucracy; it is how you compare honestly against a cheaper bid that quietly contains two fewer coats. It also makes extras painless, because anything outside the page is visibly extra.
Some jobs cost more than they pay whatever the number. The client who wants the sample free, the price fixed and the substrate taken on trust. The programme with no drying time in it. The main contractor who wants decorative money at flat-plaster rates. Walking away from these is not lost work; it is capacity saved for the client who values the craft, and there are more of those than a nervous quote assumes.
On the four-day Advanced Course we teach this properly alongside grassello, tadelakt and microcement: building the day-rate model, sampling, specification, and negotiating with designers and main contractors. Six benches, everything provided, £1,200, and Advanced students get first-job support: we help you find, price and win your first paid decorative job. If pricing is the part of the craft nobody taught you, that is exactly what it is there for.
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