Wood workshop - budgeting

I went down to the wood workshop today to discuss the possibility of producing this typographic installation and discussing the cost involved bearing in mind the budget we could attain.

I talked to one of the technicians, and presented a spec for one of the letters and he advised me that MDF was the cheapest and most effective material for this particular job. The sheets of wood they order are 6ft by 4ft which is 2440mm by 1220mm and 18mm thick. Obviously this is much shallower than the depth we need for the job. This can be rectified by stacking the sheets and gluing them in place. Each sheet of MDF costs £16 which seems a little expensive but we can get more than one letterform per sheet.

I came back to the studio and quickly mocked up the letterforms on each sheet of wood, and the word interdisciplinary can be fitted on to 2 sheets of MDF. These two sheets would then be multiplied for the depth we want. So 2 sheets is £32 and we would require between 4 to 5 for each board to achieve the required depth. So we would need either 8 or 10 boards priced at £128 (8) or £160 (10)

There is of course other materials we would also need to glue and paint the letterforms with and paint brushes, all of which would have to be budgeted for unless we could use some of the end of year show materials early.