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We are an estimating office in west Houston. Send a drawing set and you get quantities taken off the plans, unit pricing by CSI division and a total you can bid — usually in 24 to 48 hours. The local part is not a marketing line: a Houston job carries floodplain elevation, a windstorm envelope that depends on which side of Highway 146 it sits, the 2021 city construction code and a site cost that has no zoning table behind it. All four are priced below.
16319 Hillside Garden LN, Houston TX 77084 · +1-346-458-0237
Every one of those estimates is published in full, with the source PDF, on our sample estimates pages. They are drawn from work across the United States, not from Houston alone.
None of these show up in a national cost database. Each one is a real line item on a Houston takeoff, and getting any of them wrong is a five-figure miss on a mid-size job.
Inside a Houston special flood hazard area the minimum flood protection elevation is the 0.2 percent (500-year) flood elevation plus two feet, and it applies to new construction and to any existing structure expanded by a third or more. On a takeoff that is fill and compaction, a taller stem wall or a pier-and-beam frame instead of a slab, longer service runs, and a floodplain development permit on top of the building permit. It is one of the largest swings between a Houston number and the same drawings priced anywhere else.
Only the part of Harris County east of Highway 146, inside the city limits shown on the TDI map, sits in the designated catastrophe area. On that side of the line a job needs a WPI-1 certificate for TWIA windstorm coverage, and since 1 April 2026 that certification runs against the 2024 IRC or 2024 IBC — impact-rated glazing or shutters, rated assemblies, third-party inspection. West of it, none of that is required. Two otherwise identical buildings price differently, and the deciding factor is which side of a highway they are on.
The City of Houston has been on the 2021 International Building, Residential, Existing Building, Fire, Swimming Pool and Energy Conservation Codes since January 2024, with the 2021 UMC and UPC and the 2023 NEC alongside them. The metro is a patchwork of municipalities and unincorporated county, so a set of drawings can cross into a jurisdiction on a different edition. We price to the code the permitting authority is actually enforcing, not to whichever edition the drawings were drafted under.
Houston has no zoning ordinance. What governs a site instead is Chapter 42 for platting and development, Chapter 26 for off-street parking and Chapter 33 for trees and landscape. There is no use table to read the site cost off, so parking counts, setbacks, buffering, paving and the tree and shrub requirement all have to be taken off the site plan directly. Estimators who work from a zoning-code habit routinely miss the landscape and paving quantities here.
Code and floodplain rules change. The requirements above were checked against the City of Houston Code of Ordinances, the city’s 2021 construction code adoption and the Texas Department of Insurance windstorm program in September 2026 — confirm anything you are budgeting against with the authority having jurisdiction.
Full detail on each of these is on the services pages, and the quantity takeoff service page covers the measurement side on its own.
Drawings, specification, addenda and the bid date. We come back with anything missing before we start, not halfway through.
Quantities measured off the plans by CSI division, priced against current local supplier and labour rates for the jurisdiction the job is in.
A second estimator checks the takeoff against the drawings and the pricing against the market before it leaves.
Editable Excel with the formulas intact, plus a PDF summary. Ask a question about any line and you get the measurement it came from.
The office is in Houston 77084 and we estimate across the metro and the surrounding counties:
Estimating is drawing work, so the delivery is remote and the client list is nationwide — contractors in all 50 states, run out of the Houston office. There is one page for this metro rather than a page per suburb, because a separate page for Katy or Sugar Land would say the same thing with the town name swapped.