Reading drawing sets and tile schedules

When you bid for a builder you don't get a photo — you get a package. Thirty-seven sheets of architectural drawings, and somewhere separate, a tile schedule that says what goes where. Drop the whole thing into the project and BidCraft works through it: which rooms have tile in them, what goes on each surface, and how much of it.

Three steps — two are Biddy's, the third is yours

Drop the package in and a card appears at the top of your Inputs section, above your rooms, with the whole job on it one step at a time. Whichever step you're on is the one with the button — there's never a question about what to do next.

1. Biddy is reading your plans. What's in the house. Add every file in the package first — the step says 3 files staged — press Analyze plans until you do — then hit Analyze plans and the whole lot gets read together. You don't pick pages: BidCraft splits the set into sheets and works out what each one is on its own. Floor plans, tile schedules and interior elevations get read; roof plans, site plans and electrical get skipped, because there's no tile on them. While it works the step tells you which sheet it's on — Sheet 12 of 37 · 26 rooms so far — so a big package never looks stuck, and when it's done it says what it found: Biddy read your plans · 3 floor plans + 1 schedule · 48 rooms found.

2. Biddy is reading the tile schedule. What tile goes where. This is the sheet that says which rooms have tile in them and what goes on each surface, and it's usually a separate file from the drawings — often an Excel file or a PDF the builder emailed on its own. A schedule that's read before the drawings have finished waits for them, and says so; when the matching starts, the step changes to Biddy is matching rooms to the schedule so you can see it move on. When it lands, the step reads Biddy matched the tile schedule · 21 rooms · 15 lined up with the plans. If you haven't sent one, the step says so and gives you Add schedule to drop it in right there. Send it a week later and it still lands on the same job; you don't start over.

3. Your turn — check the rooms. This one's addressed to you, and it says what your part is:

Look through each room below — its name, and the note that says what tile goes where. Fix anything that's off and add what you know (a room the schedule missed, a shower that's actually a tub). When they look right, head to measurements & scope.

That's the whole job at this stage. The rooms are sitting right underneath the card, in order, each with its name and its note. Read them the way you'd read a takeoff somebody handed you: rename anything called the wrong thing, add a room the schedule missed, say so where a shower is really a tub. Nothing you add here is wasted — it all feeds the scope.

When they look right, Rooms look right → measurements takes you into Measurements & Scope.

Once all three are done the card shrinks to a single line — 📄 2 files · 3 floor plans read · 21 rooms — with View sheets on it. Tap the line any time to open it back up. You can put it away yourself at any point with the ▲ in the corner, and if you still haven't sent a tile schedule that one line keeps an Add schedule on it. A card you've put away opens itself back up while something is actually being read, so work in progress is never hidden behind a chevron.

How to tell it's still working

A big package takes minutes, and "correct but frozen" looks exactly like "stuck". So every step that's doing something says so in three ways at once.

It moves. A working step has a pulsing dot in front of it. Nothing pulses on a step that's finished or one that needs a hand.

A clock. Beside the line, counting up from when that step started — 1:42. It keeps its own time per step, so when matching starts after a long wait, the clock starts again from zero for the matching.

Where it's up to, and when we last heard. Sheet 12 of 37 · updated 4s ago, Room 5 of 13, 26 rooms so far. The "updated" part is real: it's the last thing the read itself reported, not a guess.

If nothing's been heard for a minute and a half the line stops counting seconds at you and says Still working — this one's a big sheet. After five minutes it says Taking longer than usual — still running. You can leave this page and come back, which you can: closing the tab doesn't stop the read, and the rooms are waiting when you open the project again.

If you've asked your phone or computer for reduced motion, nothing pulses — the clock and the counts still tick.

While the rooms get measured

There's a fourth thing that happens after matching, and it used to be silent. Where the schedule didn't put a number on a surface, Biddy goes back to the drawings and reads the size off the sheet — one room at a time, which is the slowest part of the whole job on a big house.

Step 3 now says so while it happens: Biddy is measuring the rooms · Room 5 of 13, with the same dot, clock and heartbeat as the steps above it. The rooms are already on the page and you can start going through them — what's still arriving is the sizes.

Most of those sizes land as suggestions for you to check, never as numbers dropped into your bid. The one exception is a floor on a real CAD drawing set: there Biddy follows the architect's own line work round the room and converts it at the sheet's own scale, so the floor arrives filled in and marked Measured from the drawings. Type over it and your number wins.

That scale can come from three places. A designer's sheet prints it once in the title block. An architect's permit set usually prints it under each drawing's title instead — the overall plan at one scale, an enlarged plan at another, a detail in the corner at a third — so Biddy reads the scale of the drawing each room is actually in. And either way it checks the scale against the dimensions printed on the sheet: if those say the drawing was plotted at something else, the dimensions win, and if the sheet prints no scale at all but its dimensions agree with each other, they're used on their own. When none of that is there, the floor is left for you rather than guessed. And a floor measured on a small drawing — smaller than 1/4" = 1'-0", like the overall plan at the front of a permit set — or one whose walls the sheet doesn't draw all the way round, arrives as a measured suggestion you take with Use, not as a filled-in number.

On a permit set, each room is measured where it's drawn biggest. An architect's set usually draws the whole house once on a small overall plan, then draws the bathrooms and bedrooms again, twice the size, on enlarged plan sheets. Biddy finds each room on the enlarged plan by the name printed there — a name stacked on two lines, like MASTER over BATH, included — and measures it there, so those floors arrive filled in as Measured from the drawings rather than as suggestions. When the two drawings disagree, the enlarged plan's number is the one used; the overall plan's number is kept beside it with a note and is never priced. One exception: a room that comes out more than 15% bigger on the enlarged plan than on the overall plan is offered as a suggestion instead, because that usually means a hallway at the edge of the enlarged view got counted in with the room. A name printed twice on one sheet isn't linked to either room.

A tile layout drawn on the floor is still one floor. Some plans draw the tile itself — an entry laid out square by square in a checkered pattern. Those lines are the pattern, not walls, so the room is measured out to its walls and doorways as one floor, not as the single tile square its name happens to be printed in.

The shower inside the bathroom is measured off the plan too. Biddy finds the shower in the drawing and offers its floor on its own — marked measured off the plan for a shower walled on three sides, a rough read for a corner shower with glass on two. Its walls are offered as the walls the shower actually stands against times the tile height the elevations print; the glass side, the curb and the door aren't counted as tiled wall. Both are suggestions you take with Use. If no sheet prints how high the shower tile goes, the walls stay blank rather than borrow a standard height.

A floor measured off the line work stops at the face of the walls. On a permit set, where a wall is drawn as its two faces with the insulation pattern between them, the wall itself is never counted as floor, and a room never runs through a wall into the hallway or the bathroom next door. When the measured floor still needs a second look, the note beside it says why:

• The view is cut off. An enlarged plan is a crop of the building, and sometimes the crop runs right through a room. The floor stops at the edge of the drawing; if the overall plan draws the whole room and agrees, the number is used, and if not, the overall plan's number is offered instead, with a note saying the enlarged plan only shows part of the room.
• Part of the outline is open. When a floor runs open into the room next to it — a bar that opens onto the family room, say — it arrives as a suggestion, and the note names the rooms it runs into and for how many feet.
• The floor runs into the shower. When a plan draws the shower's glass but no curb, the floor can take in the shower floor. The shower floor is measured on its own, and the floor's note tells you how much of it is shower and what the floor is without it, for when you price the two separately.
• The drawing doesn't close the room at all. Then the floor is read from the picture instead, and the note says so, so you can check it against the dimensions printed on the plan.

Where to drop the package

Every room card in the Inputs section has a Plans box, sitting beside Notes, Image and Video. Tap it and drop the package in — PDFs, photos of a printed sheet, Excel files and CSVs, as many as you've got. Big files are fine; a full permit set is normal here.

The drop zone stays open while you add files. They stack up underneath as you go — name, size, and a thumbnail if it's a photo — and each one starts transferring the second you drop it, so nothing waits on you. Dropped the wrong file? The × on it takes it back out.

Nothing is read until you say the package is complete. Hit Analyze plans and everything goes in together, which matters: drawings read alongside their tile schedule tell us which rooms have tile in them, and drawings read on their own can't. If everything you've added is a spreadsheet or a photo of a table, the button says Read the schedule instead.

Stay on the page until the files have uploaded — they go up from your phone or computer, so closing the tab mid-upload stops the ones that haven't gone yet (your browser asks before it lets you leave). Once they're in and you've pressed Analyze plans, you can close the page: the reading, the matching and the measuring all carry on without it.

Plans is on every room card, but the files belong to the whole project, not to one room. Tapping it inside a room does one useful thing: if the plan turns out to cover a single room, that room lands on the card you were standing in instead of appearing as a second one next to it. And if you were still on an empty Room 1 when you uploaded a whole set, the first room takes that card over rather than leaving it sitting there empty.

What happens next depends on what you sent

You sent a tile schedule as well. The schedule is the part that says which rooms have tile in them, so the rooms build themselves. Step 2 ticks over — Biddy matched the tile schedule · 21 rooms · 15 lined up with the plans — and step 3 hands them over for you to look through.

A designer's spec sheet counts as a schedule. It doesn't have to say schedule on it. A sheet titled Specifications or Selections — a row per location, with the tile, the vendor, the item number, the colour and the grout beside it — is read exactly the same way, fine print and all. The usual note at the top, contractor is responsible for all take-offs, is the designer telling you the sheet has no quantities on it; Biddy reads it the same way you do, and the sizes come off the plans instead.

Those sheets usually have one Location column that names the room and the surface in the same breath — Bath 2 Shower Floor, Primary Bath Vanity Wall Tile — often under a heading for the suite or wing it belongs to. Biddy takes the two apart: the tile lands on Bath 2, on its shower floor, rather than turning up as a room called Bath 2 Shower Floor with a question asking where it is. Anything written after the place — mudset walls to miter edges, polish all exposed edges — is kept as an installation note, and a lay pattern or caption printed under the swatch stays with the tile. A row whose location says nothing but the lay — Entry – Checkered Lay, Running Bond, Stacked — is the floor, laid that way: the pattern lands on the floor as its pattern instead of turning up as a surface called Checkered Lay with a question asking whether you're bidding it. Two rows like that with two different tiles on them (a checkerboard needs two colours) stay as two selections on the one floor. A slip of the keyboard on the sheet — wianscot, trim egde — is read as the word it was meant to be. And a line that lists several rooms and then sends you to another drawing — Kitchen, Office, Office Closet – see flooring plan for locations — isn't a room: it comes to you as a question about which rooms it covers.

A designer's words for a bathroom are read the way a tile setter means them. A designer tells a bathroom's two floors apart by where they are, so Vanity Floor is the bathroom floor and Shower Floor is the pan; Vanity and Shower Floor is both. Vanity Wall Tile is the room's wall tile, labelled as the vanity wall. A row that ends at the edge — Shower Wall Tile Trim Edge, Wainscot Tile Edge, a bullnose — is the trim piece, so it lands as a tile liner measured by the foot instead of as a second tile on the wall it finishes. And a tiled fireplace lands as an accent wall, labelled as the fireplace.

One room, one card — whatever each sheet calls it. A designer's package names the same room three ways: Laundry on the floor plan, Laundry Room on its elevations, LAUNDRY on the spec sheet; Guest bath on one and Guest Suite Bathroom on another; Master here and Primary there. Biddy treats those as the one room they are, so the tile off the spec sheet and the sizes off the elevations land on the same card instead of on twins. The card keeps the name it already had. It only does this when exactly one of your rooms fits — Bath 2 is never Bath 3, Kitchen is never Back Kitchen, a line shared by two rooms (Laundry & Mudroom) is never folded into just one of them — when the plans draw both rooms it goes on each, and when they don't it stays one card — and two rooms the plans number separately are never folded into one. When it isn't sure, you get two cards and can delete one, which is a smaller problem than one room's tile on another room's walls.

A detail set that redraws a room the overall plan already showed is still one room. Builders who send one overall plan plus a separate CAD set per room — kitchen, primary suite, pool bath, one file each — used to get every one of those rooms twice, and a "which room is this?" check with two pictures of the same kitchen in it. Now the redrawn copy folds into the room the overall plan printed, so the rooms list and the add any of these rooms? offer each name a room once. Two rooms the architect numbered separately, Bath 2 against Bath 3, two of one label on a single sheet, and the same room name on two floors or in two buildings all stay separate.

Cards that were already doubled up before this change stay as they are — delete the spare, or start a fresh project from the same files.

You sent plans only. Nothing on a set of drawings says which rooms you're bidding, so nothing gets created until you say. Step 1 reads 3 floor plans read · 48 rooms found and lists every one of those rooms right underneath, grouped by floor, with its number beside it.

Bathrooms and kitchens start ticked, because those are the rooms with tile in them nine times out of ten. Anything you named in Tell Biddy before it reads starts ticked too. Tick and untick whatever you like — Select all is there if you're bidding the whole house — then hit Create 5 rooms.

They turn up as ordinary room cards straight away, each one saying where it came from: From plans · Room 116 · 1st floor. When the sheets never printed a number for a room, the card just says the floor — you'll never see a made-up number you can't find on the drawings. Add photos and notes to any of them, or head to Measurements & Scope and start putting numbers on.

Rooms that came off the plans but have nothing in them yet say that too — Add the tile schedule for what goes here, or add notes/photos. Once a schedule lands, that line is replaced by what the builder actually specified: Tile: Cotto Med 6x6 · 73 boxes (schedule).

That tile also lands on your materials list, on the line that installs it: at $0 if the client is buying the tile, or at your price if you are. See Materials lists explained.

If you'd rather not decide yet, Not now puts the picker away and the card carries on showing you where things stand.

To change your mind later, Change room selection reopens the same list — with the rooms you're already bidding at the top, ticked, so you can see the whole selection rather than a list of rooms you don't recognise. To take a room back out of the bid, use the room card itself.

Send the takeoff too, if the builder did one

A tile schedule tells you what goes where. It almost never tells you how much — most of its lines count boxes, and a box count isn't a square footage until you know what's in a box.

The document that does carry square footage is the tile area takeoff: a plain list of areas against SF, usually put together by the builder or the designer, and usually emailed as a screenshot or a one-page PDF. If you've got one, add it to the package. It's the single biggest thing you can send us for getting real numbers on the bid.

Drop it in the same Plans box as everything else — it gets recognised on its own, and you don't have to say what it is.

What it does:

• Its numbers land on your rooms. A line reading Guest Bathroom 6 Pony Wall and Shower Walls — 70 puts 70 square feet on that bathroom's shower walls. It reads the room and the surface out of the one line.
• It never invents a room. A takeoff line is a measurement of a room, not a new room. If we can't work out which room a line means, you get asked — Which room is this for? — "ODK" — with the rooms to pick from. You'll never open the project and find a room called Guest Bathroom 6 Pony Wall and Shower Walls.
• It can pull in a room the schedule forgot. If the takeoff prices the pantry and the schedule never mentions it, the pantry comes into the bid — but only when the takeoff names it exactly. Anything looser is a question.
• A number that can't be right is refused. A 180 sq ft shower floor is a typo, not a shower. It doesn't land; it goes on the list of things to check, with the figure quoted, so you can see what the takeoff said.

Takeoff numbers usually include waste

Most takeoffs are material order quantities — they've got the cut-and-breakage allowance built in, and the good ones say so at the bottom: "actual install SF should run approximately 10–15% under these numbers."

A bid prices what you install, not what you order, so when the document says that, we price the trimmed figure and show you:

The takeoff includes waste — we took 12.5% off 19 areas. Look right? · Brantmans Bath shower walls — takeoff 215 sq ft, we used 188.1 · Ahrens shower walls — takeoff 205 sq ft, we used 179.4

Looks right settles it. Use the takeoff numbers as printed genuinely puts them all back — every trimmed area goes to the figure the takeoff printed, they become your numbers, and re-reading the documents won't trim them again. If the takeoff says nothing about waste, nothing is trimmed — we don't invent an allowance the builder didn't state.

The waste the takeoff printed isn't lost, either. It becomes that surface's Waste %, so when the tile gets bought the order goes back up to what the takeoff said — you bid the installed area and order the takeoff's amount. If you chose Use the takeoff numbers as printed, the surface's waste drops to 0%, because the printed figure already includes it; nothing gets padded twice. You can change any surface's waste on its sheet — see Editing project dimensions.

Elevations and renders get read for sizes too

The plans tell you the shape of the house. The interior elevations — and a designer's rendered room sheets — are where the wall sizes live: the run of the wall, how high the tile goes, sometimes the room's own dimensions printed right on the drawing.

Those sheets get read now. Where a sheet prints a wall's run and its tile height, that's a wall's worth of square footage; where it prints a room as 12'-6" x 9'-0", that's the floor. Four elevation views of one shower add up to the shower's walls. The same room drawn twice counts once.

Nothing lands as a number on its own. You get a check with the figures quoted back:

Bath Three floor: the elevations add up to 81.6 sq ft — use that? · 71-1/2" × 164-1/4"

Accept it and it becomes your number, the same as if you'd typed it. Leave it and the surface keeps its gap. A surface you've already put a number on is never asked about and never overwritten.

Every sheet ends up somewhere. A sheet titled with a room you already have lands on it. A sheet whose title doesn't match anything — a set that draws the primary bath on three sheets when the schedule never listed a primary bath — is offered as a room you can add, on the same add any of these rooms? list the plans feed, so the sizes it prints aren't thrown away. Sheets drawing the same room land on one room, not three.

When Biddy can't tell which room a sheet is for, you get one question for all of them. A designer titles the elevation Guest Kitchen and your card is called Guest Suite Living; an architect titles one Primary Shower when the room is the Primary Bath; a sheet prints sizes and no room name at all. Every sheet like that goes on one check:

These sheets show tile sizes but I can't tell which room they're for Guest Kitchen · Backsplash 61.5 sq ft · sheet 3 — Which room?

Each sheet is its own row, with the sheet beside it — tap the picture to open it — and its own Which room? picker. The rooms it most looks like are at the top, and every room in your bid is on the list, so the right one is always there even when its name is nothing like the sheet's. Pick the room and that sheet's sizes land on its card, through the same rules as every other elevation: as suggestions you accept or ignore, never prices on their own. The rest of the sheets stay on the check until you get to them. Three sheets titled the same room are one row, and one pick places all three.

Two more ways out on every row. None of these — add a new room puts the sheet's room on the list of rooms you can add. Not in this bid sets that sheet aside for good — nothing from it lands anywhere, and it's never asked about again. Not sure — skip puts the whole check away; a re-read won't ask about those sheets again, but a sheet from a file you add later still gets asked about.

A sheet that just counts gets asked about, not invented. Designers title render pages Bath One, Bath Two, Bath Three while the schedule calls the same rooms Maddox's Bath and Jax's Bathroom. A title like that hasn't named a room — it's told you the kind and given you a number — so instead of quietly adding a fifth bathroom to your four-bathroom job, the sheet goes on that same which room check, with the baths that don't have a sheet yet at the top of its picker. Bath One and Bath Two are separate rows, so answering one doesn't answer the other, because two render pages can be two views of the same room.

You can skip the question entirely by saying so before the read. In the Tell Biddy before it reads box on the upload tray, a plain sentence does it:

Bath One is Maddox's bath. Bath Two is Jax's bathroom.

Write it however you like — is, =, or an arrow all work — and those sheets land where you said without asking. A title that names a real room the schedule just didn't cover, like Primary Bathroom, is still offered as a room you can add; that one isn't a guess, it's a room your schedule didn't reach.

A wall the schedule never listed still gets offered. A tile schedule is a list of products; an elevation is a drawing of the work. If the sheet draws and dimensions a shower wall your schedule didn't mention, the wall shows up on the room with the size offered — not priced, just offered, waiting for your tap.

Tile heights come straight off the sheet. This is the one number nothing else in a package tells us — a permit set has no elevations and a schedule has no heights, so everywhere else BidCraft falls back to the usual heights and asks you to confirm them. Where an elevation prints the tile height, that's what the surface gets, and you don't get asked about it. Heights you've set yourself always win. And when the height Biddy read doesn't match anything the sheet actually prints — a wainscot read as 6'-6" on a drawing that says 3'-6" to top of wall tile, twice — the height the sheet prints is the one used.

A height is kept even when the view prints no wall length. Shower elevations often print only the ceiling height — 10'-0" CLG. HGT. on every view — and not one wall width. That height still reaches the shower walls, and where the plan measures the shower, the walls are offered as the plan's run times the height the sheet prints. The suggestion says so, so you know which half came from which sheet.

A fixture's height is never the tile's. A dimension to the center of a valve, the bottom of a mirror or the top of a counter says where something sits, not where the tile stops. When a read pairs a wall with one of those, the sheet's own splash or tile height is used instead — and a backsplash starts at the counter the sheet prints. A kitchen that draws its splash across two elevation sheets is added up, wall by wall.

One wall of several is asked about as one wall. When the sheets print a tile height but dimension only part of the walls it runs on, you're told that instead of being asked to take a partial number as the whole thing:

Primary Bath wainscot: the elevations dimension only 14'-0" of it at 42" (49 sq ft) — how far does it run?

Tap Edit and enter the full area, or accept it if that really is all of it.

A wall with no tile height is a wall, not a tile area. Architects' interior elevations often dimension the whole wall and leave the tile to the finish schedule, which names the material but not how high it goes. When a sheet sizes a wall floor to ceiling and never says where the tile stops, you're asked about it as a wall:

Great Room accent wall: the elevations show a 534.8 sq ft wall — how much of it is tiled?

Tap Edit and enter the tiled part, or accept it if the tile really does run all the way up. For a backsplash, if the sheet prints the counter height, the wall is offered from the counter up.

A note that says "floor to ceiling" is read. When an elevation's own notes say Wall tile floor to ceiling and the sheet prints the wall's length and the ceiling height, that wall is offered at its full size — and the question says nothing has been taken out for a door, a window or the cabinets on it:

Primary Bath wall tile: floor to ceiling per the sheet's note — 150 sq ft with nothing taken out. Use that?

That only applies to the wall that sheet draws. A 42" wainscot printed on the room's other elevations stays a wainscot.

A wall with a length and no tile height gets asked about, not skipped. Some elevations dimension a wall and never say where its tile stops — a laundry's washer wall, a kitchenette, a fireplace wall marked design TBD. There is no area to offer, so you get one question for that surface, with the lengths the sheet prints underneath:

Laundry backsplash: the elevations print 7'-2" of wall but no tile height — how many sq ft are tiled?

Tap Pick… and type the tiled area. The same goes for a sheet that prints two different tile heights on one wall without saying which part stops where — you're shown both heights and asked, rather than given an average.

A niche the drawing labels is counted. A shower view that draws a niche and simply writes NICHE inside it is counted as one niche, the same as a niche the sheet dimensions.

A floor only comes from a sheet that prints it. A floor size is offered only when the drawing prints the room's two dimensions together, like 12'-6" x 9'-0". Two dimensions from two different places on a plan aren't a room size, and a wall drawing never offers a floor at all.

One thing worth knowing: only what's printed. An elevation that doesn't state a size isn't scaled off the drawing, and nobody counts tiles and multiplies. Where there's something to ask — a wall with a length but no tile height — you get the question above; where there isn't, you get nothing for it, and a sheet with no dimensions on it is a normal answer. (Floors and shower walls measured off the plan's own line work are a different thing, covered earlier on this page.)

Every size in one place — and one tap to take them

Accepting sizes one check at a time is fine for a bathroom. On a twenty-room house it's twenty taps, and you never get to see the whole job at once. So there's a sheet that lists every surface on the job with its size and where that size came from.

Three ways in. On the plans card, step 3 counts them — 21 rooms ready · 12 plan sizes ready to review — with Review 12 plan sizes beside it. Once you've condensed that card to its one-line summary, the same Review 12 plan sizes link sits on the summary line itself, so sizes waiting on you are never more than one tap away. And any room whose surfaces have sizes waiting carries a Review 3 plan sizes row in its quick checks, which opens the same sheet for that room only.

The sizes show on the surfaces themselves

You don't have to open anything to see what the drawings read. A surface that has a size waiting says so on its own tile, under the name:

• ~114.2 sq ft suggested — a figure read off a printed dimension.
• ~6.3 sq ft rough read — measured off the drawn shape rather than a printed number. Treat it as a starting point.
• 1 suggested — a niche or a bench the shower views drew. That's a count, not an area; the tile on it is already inside the shower-wall figure.

It's written in dashed terracotta, the same way every unknown on a room card is written, because it isn't a measurement yet — nothing is priced off it until you take it. Beside it is a Use button that makes that one figure yours in a tap. Tapping the tile itself still opens the surface to edit, exactly as before, and the size shows there too with the runs the sheet printed underneath it — 24'-0" × 5'-0" TO TOP OF SLABSPLASH — so you can judge the total before you take it.

Every surface gets a row, grouped by room, and each row is tagged with the kind of number it is:

• Printed — the sheet stated the figures and we copied them down. The strings it printed are quoted under the row, view by view, so you can check the total against the drawing.
• Computed — the drawing printed a width and a depth and we multiplied them. The dimensions are shown under the row.
• Scaled — nothing was printed, so the drawn shape was measured against the sheet's scale. That's a starting point, not a measurement.
• Yours — you already put a number on this surface. It's shown for completeness and nothing on this sheet can change it.
• No size — nothing on the drawings gave this one an area. Also shown, because a gap you can see is better than a gap you find out about while pricing.

Printed and computed rows are ticked when the sheet opens. Scaled rows start unticked — they're estimates, so taking one is a decision you make rather than one made for you. Tick all and Untick all are there when you want to work the other way round, and the button says how many you're taking: Accept 9 plan sizes.

Every row has the sheet it came off beside it. Tap it and you get the drawing, zoomable, with the spot marked — the same view the checks give you. It's worth a look on anything scaled.

Accepting makes those figures yours, exactly as if you'd typed them, and the rows flip to Yours on the spot. A surface you'd already measured is never touched. If a size came off the tile schedule and the elevations read something different, that row says what it would replace and starts unticked, so the builder's own figure never gets swapped out quietly.

Each room arrives with a note on it

Every room that comes off the documents gets a note written straight into its Notes box, saying what the plans and the schedule said about it:

From your plans & schedule — Pool Bathroom (Room 116, 1st floor): • Floor: Cotto Tierra Diamond 8 (Clay Imports) · 6 boxes · Approved • 3rd row & below: Conectada Jade 6x6 Gloss (Clay Imports) · 150 pcs · HOLD • Shower walls: ~104.2 sq ft from the elevations at 10' tile height — suggested (Some of this is on hold in the schedule — check before you order.)

Anything the elevations gave the room shows up here too, marked as a suggestion so you can tell at a glance what's off the schedule and what's off a drawing.

It's written the way you'd say it, not the way the sheet prints it. A spec cell that reads NAME: BISON BRICK SIZE: 2" X 8" comes through as Bison Brick 2x8; the colour, the grout and the lay pattern are each said once and said short. A vendor's sales rep — their name, e-mail or phone, wherever the sheet tucked them — is left off the room card entirely. A lead-time warning is not: order early on the custom colour is exactly the sort of thing this note is for. The sheet itself is always a tap away behind the little page marker, with every word of it intact.

It's an ordinary note, in the place you'd have typed one yourself — so the Notes box goes green, and everything that reads your notes reads this too.

Edit it however you like: add the valve height, add what the super told you on site. Once you've touched it, it's yours — re-reading the documents won't overwrite it or write a second one beside it. Leave it alone and it stays current: clear a hold on the schedule, re-read, and the note follows.

Rooms the documents said nothing about beyond a name don't get a note. There'd be nothing in it.

[!tip] Tell Biddy before it reads sits in the upload box from the moment you open it — under the drop zone, before you've dropped a thing. Type what you'd tell a helper before handing them the set — "only the 3 upstairs baths", "the pool bath is out", "ceilings are 10 ft", "the T-codes are on sheet A11" — and it steers the whole read: which rooms are yours, what height the walls run to, where to look when a finish code doesn't make sense. It'll never put a number on a surface the documents didn't print; it just helps Biddy read what's there properly. Forgot to write it? It's still under View sheets, and re-reading the documents picks it up.

Looking at the sheets

View sheets on that card opens everything we opened: each file with its progress, and a strip of every sheet badged with what it is — Plan, Schedule, Section, Elevation — and a dot showing whether it was read. Tap any sheet to see it full size.

Most of the time you never need to go in there. It's the way in when something's off:

• A sheet got filed wrong — a schedule read as a detail, a plan read as an elevation. Open it and use This is a… to say what it really is: Floor plan, Tile / finish schedule, Interior elevation, or Nothing with tile on it.
• A sheet we filed as having no tile on it that actually does. Read this sheet asks you what it is, then reads it.
• A sheet that wouldn't open at all. Try reading again has another go at just that one.
• If a whole file came back with nothing readable in it, the card says so plainly and gives you View sheets to pick out the one that matters, and Read again to have another go at the lot.

Removing a file lives in here too, as does Update rooms from saved readings.

Rooms come out the other side

Once the read finishes, the rooms show up in Measurements & Scope like any other room, each with its number and floor from the plans — Room 116 · 1st floor. Inside a room you get every tiled surface, its area, the tile size, material and pattern, and the product the schedule specified: vendor, item number, box count, and whether it's approved or on hold.

Each surface now says which tile goes on it. Under the surface's name there's a quiet line with the tile and who sells it — Bison Brick 2x8 (Craftsmans Court) — so a bathroom with four different tiles reads as four different tiles at a glance, instead of a grid of sizes with the products buried in the note. Where the schedule specified two tiles for one surface it shows the first and +1 more. Open the surface to size it and the same line sits at the top as Tile, with the sheet tag beside it.

The fixtures on a room are the ones your tile goes around. A bathroom picks up its toilet, vanity, tub and shower off the plan; a kitchen, at most, its sink. Appliances, cabinets, islands, pantries, closets and shelving are drawn on the plans but aren't tile work, so they don't land. Neither does a fixture that couldn't be in that room — a plan crop round a kitchen often takes in the powder room next door, and a vanity on a kitchen card is the powder room's. Fixtures you add or change yourself always stay, and a re-read takes back any the plans put there that don't belong.

Rooms the plans show but the schedule never mentions collapse into a single line — 27 more rooms on the plans without tile work. Tap it and you get the same list as the Plans card: tick the ones the builder left off and add them all in one go. That list is rooms only — the area schedule printed in the corner of a sheet, with its Total Livable and Total Under Roof rows, is square footage being added up, and it never comes to you as a room.

Every number carries a little sheet tag beside it. Tap it and you see exactly where it came from — the crop of the drawing with the room labeled, or the schedule row with that line highlighted. No hunting through the PDF to check.

When you draft the scope on a whole-house package, it comes back room by room — every room the schedule shows tile in gets its own line, named for the room, and priced per area rather than bundled into one line per room, because that's how a builder's package reads. A room whose sizes you haven't measured yet still gets its line; the quantity comes later.

The lines come out grouped by floor — Ground Level, then First Floor, then Exterior, then Second Floor — with a heading above each group, the way you'd walk the job. That grouping follows through onto the finished proposal and the copy your client sees. Work that spans the whole house rather than sitting in one room — demo and protection, substrate prep, waterproofing, grout and seal, trim, disposal, permits, final clean — comes after the rooms, as ordinary lines with no heading. If your plans don't name floors, you just get the rooms in plan order with no headings, which is the right answer for a job on one level.

Adding your own photos and notes to a plan room

Every room that came off the plans takes photos, videos, and notes like any other room — tap + Photo, + Video, or + Note on its card. They add to what the sheets already said; they never replace it.

The room's button changes to match what's on it:

• A room with nothing but the sheets behind it says Re-read this room's sheets. Press it after a sheet changed, and Biddy reads just the pages that drew this room — nothing else on the job moves.
• A room with sheets and your own photos or notes says Analyze this room (or Re-analyze this room once it has run). One press does both, in order: the sheets are read again, then the photos and notes are analyzed with the sheets' facts in view — the tile the schedule named, the heights the elevations printed, the areas it suggested. The pill shows Reading sheets… and then Analyzing….
• Next to that button, Re-read sheets only refreshes the plans side without the photo analysis. Handy when you swapped a schedule and the photos are the same as before.

Your typed measurements and answers always win. The sheets rank below them, and a photo estimate ranks below the sheets.

A few plain questions

Drawings and schedules disagree. Three rooms are called Laundry, the schedule says one thing and the plan measures another, a line is on hold. Rather than guess, BidCraft asks you — one short question at a time. The run opens by saying what you've walked into:

Biddy pulled these rooms and tile from your plans & schedule. A few quick checks first — then the numbers, then the scope.

Then the questions:

• Which room is "Laundry Room" on the plans?
• Which room is this for? — "Tile — Floor" (Cotto Med 6x6 Terracotta)
• These sheets show tile sizes but I can't tell which room they're for — one row per elevation sheet, each with its own room picker
• Powder Bathroom floor: the schedule says 83 sq ft, the plan reads about 58 sq ft. Which should we use?
• Primary Bath 1 backsplash is on HOLD in the schedule — bid it, leave it out, or check with the builder?

Every question says why it's asking, in a sentence right under it — before the answers, not buried beneath them:

The schedule lists "Laundry Room" — the plans have 3 rooms that could be it (108 Laundry / Storage on the 1st floor, 205 Laundry and 219 on the 2nd floor). Tap the one that gets this tile.

The schedule has this line marked HOLD, which means the builder hasn't settled the product yet. Bidding it prices what's listed today; leaving it out keeps it off the quote until they decide.

Every one has a Not sure — skip, so you're never stuck. And your answer sticks: re-reading the documents later honors it instead of asking again.

Sizes aren't asked one by one. A whole-house package can produce twenty of them, and twenty near-identical questions isn't twenty decisions — it's one. So the sizes the drawings read sit at the top of the checks as a single row — 12 sizes came off the drawings — check them before you price them — with Review 12 plan sizes next to it. They count as one thing waiting on you everywhere a count is shown, and the row goes away as you accept them. The figures themselves are on the surfaces, so you can also just take them one at a time with Use.

Answered once is answered everywhere. It doesn't matter whether you tapped the card, typed the number straight onto the room, or told Biddy out loud — it's the same question and it's done. Ask her what's still open right after answering one on the card and she'll leave it out, the way she should.

Look at the sheet before you answer

There's a picture beside the question and, on a "which room?" check, one beside each room you're choosing between — each cropped in close on its own corner of the drawing, rather than the same shrunken sheet four times over. They open.

• The picture beside the question opens the sheet it came off, with the spot outlined — the room label on the drawing, or the schedule row highlighted.
• The picture beside a room opens that room on the plans. It carries a ⤢ in the corner to show it opens, and tapping the room's name is what picks it. Two taps, two different jobs — looking never picks something by accident.

A close-up of one room still has the rooms next door in it, so the room's own label is outlined on every picture — on the little thumbnail beside the answer and again when you open it. You can see which room you're being asked about without reading the whole corner of the sheet.

Once a sheet is open you can get in close. Pinch on a phone or tablet, scroll or double-click on a computer, or use + and −; drag to move around, and Fit puts the whole sheet back on screen. Zoom in and the picture sharpens rather than going blocky — a bigger copy of the sheet loads behind the scenes the moment you go past a certain point, so the fine print is actually readable. The outline stays on the thing it marks however far in you go, which is the point: a full-size architectural sheet squeezed onto a phone is unreadable until you zoom it.

Wall heights are one question, not one per wall

Drawings don't print wall heights and tile schedules don't carry them, so every tiled wall falls back to the usual ones. On a whole-house job that's the same handful of assumptions on seventeen surfaces — so you're asked once:

Wall heights — we assumed these on 17 surfaces. Look right? · Full walls — to the ceiling, 8'-0" · 9 surfaces · Backsplash — 1'-6" up the wall · 6 surfaces · Tub surround — 6'-0" up the wall · 2 surfaces

Looks right settles the lot. If your ceilings aren't eight foot, Ceilings are 9' or Ceilings are 10' rewrites the full-height walls and accepts everything else in the same tap.

A wall the schedule actually gave a height for is never part of this — that's a real number and it stands. And any single surface can still be changed by hand on its room card.

One figure across two areas

A takeoff often writes one number for two things at once — Guest Bathroom 6 Outfloor and Shower Floor · 75 is the bathroom floor and the shower tray on one line. Putting all 75 on the floor prices the floor too high and the tray at nothing; putting 75 on each bills the job twice. So it gets shared out — the tray takes a tray's worth and the floor takes the rest — and you're told, once, with the original figure quoted so you can check the arithmetic:

5 takeoff figures cover two areas each — we split them. Look right? · Guest Bath 6 — takeoff 75 sq ft covers floor + shower floor; we put 55.8 on the floor and 9.8 on the shower floor

Looks right settles the lot. Put each figure on one area instead hands the shared-out portion back to the main area and leaves the second one without a number, so it shows up again on the list of areas still to measure. Either way you can type your own number on any room card — and a shared-out figure is a starting point, not a measurement, so it's worth a look if the shower is an unusual size.

Areas with no square footage

Some rows simply don't give one. The builder marked it TBD, or the schedule ordered 21 box — which is a purchase, not an area, and no arithmetic turns one into the other. Rather than let those price at zero in silence, they're gathered into one check that names every one and says why:

18 areas have no square footage and 1 figure needs a second look. Want to see which? · Scullery backsplash — the takeoff row reads TBD · Foyer wall tile — the schedule orders 21 box, which doesn't say how big the area is · Guest Bath 2 shower floor — the takeoff says 180 sq ft, which is too big for a shower floor — worth checking

That list only holds the ones nothing can settle. Where the drawing gives a reading, you get it as its own one-tap question with the number in it — P. Bath 1 floor: the plan reads about 10'-9" × 10'-3" (~110 sq ft) — use that? — rather than being told twice that the same floor has no size. Accept it and it becomes your number.

Nobody said how the outside corners are finished

A schedule that lists no edge trim isn't telling you the corners are mitered — it's the commonest schedule there is, and turning that silence into a couple of hundred feet of mitering would be inventing work. But leaving it alone means a bid with no edge treatment on it at all, which is worse. So when nothing in the package mentions trim or mitering, you get one question on the scope, above the lines: are outside corners mitered? Say yes and a clearly marked allowance goes on as its own line with the footage editable; say trim is by others and nothing goes on. Not sure yet? Not sure — skip is a real answer too — nothing goes on the bid and the question stops coming back until you raise it. All three are remembered, so redrafting the scope doesn't ask again — and if the documents do say, the question never appears.

Or just talk it through with Biddy

Every one of those quick checks can be answered by tapping the card — or by saying the answer out loud. Open Biddy on the project, hit the mic, and go:

Alright, let's go through this one together. What do you still need from me?

Biddy pulls up what's still open and takes them one at a time, in plain language, biggest first — not a wall of questions. Answer the way you'd answer a foreman and she settles each one as you go:

• "Those wall heights look right, take them as they are."
• "Don't trim the takeoff — bid the numbers it printed."
• "Boys bunk bathroom floor is 46 square feet, I measured it."
• "Use the area you read off the drawing for the pool bath."
• "Yeah, the outside corners are mitered. Carry the allowance."
• "Those lines you worked out across the house look right."

Each one shows you exactly what's about to change and waits for you to confirm. Nothing moves until you say so.

Stray details become notes. Halfway through you'll remember something that isn't an answer to anything — "the slab dips half an inch at the drain in there", "no site access before eight, the gate's locked". Say it anyway. Biddy writes it onto that room (or onto the job) as a real note, exactly as if you'd typed it into the room's Notes box — so it feeds the analysis and the scope like every other note you've written, and it outranks anything read off a photo or a drawing.

You can still ask her plain questions any time:

• What tile goes on the pool bath wainscot?
• Which rooms have no area yet?
• What's still unresolved?
• Walk me through the schedule room by room

And she can fix things — settle which room a schedule line belongs to, merge two rooms that are really one, correct an area.

Re-reading and removing

The rooms are never locked in. There are three ways to read again, from lightest to heaviest.

Re-analyze documents reads every file again from scratch — every sheet, every schedule row, every elevation — and includes any file you've added since the last read. It sits on the Plans card (open or collapsed) and under View sheets. Press it after you swap a file, add a sheet, or suspect the first read missed something. Your answers, room names, and the measurements you typed are kept; anything a re-read page no longer says is taken back. Once you've pressed it you can leave the page — every file is read again whether or not you're watching.

Inside that same dialog is a Start over box, off by default. Tick it when the first read matched rooms badly — say it paired the tile schedule's "Bath 2" with the wrong bathroom — because then every answer you gave since was against the wrong room, and keeping those answers would re-create the mistake. Start over forgets which room each sheet was matched to and the quick checks you answered, then reads everything fresh. Your room cards, photos, notes, and typed measurements still stay.

Update rooms from saved readings (under View sheets) is the light touch: it applies the information already recovered from your files to the rooms without opening the files again. It keeps your answers and edits.

To check the original page afresh, open that sheet and choose Read this sheet again. This can help when a measurement or schedule row was missed. Your room edits and confirmed measurements are kept. A sheet marked Needs review still needs comparison with the original even when some information was recovered.

For one room, use the room's own button — see Adding your own photos and notes to a plan room above.

The Plans card now shows how many surfaces have confirmed measurements, documented quantities, suggestions, or missing measurements. Suggestions need your confirmation before they become measurements. Where a schedule specifies several tiles for one surface, the room note keeps each selection and its details separately; check how the area should be divided between them.

If a file stops partway through. Now and again a big set stops mid-read. Rather than sitting there saying it's still working, the card gives up on that file after a few quiet minutes and says so — This file stopped partway through the read — with Read again right there. Press it. If the same file keeps stopping, tell us with the lightbulb and send the file name. This happens whether or not the page is open: the rest of the package is still matched and measured without the stopped file, so you come back to rooms, not a spinner.

If the matching stops partway through. Once every file is read, one more pass lines the schedule up against the plans and builds the rooms. That pass can stop too, and it used to be the worse one to be stuck behind — every file finished, nothing left to press, and step 2 spinning on work nobody was doing any more. Now BidCraft gives it one more go by itself; if that stops too, the card says so: Matching stopped partway, with the same Read again underneath it. The measuring step gets the same single retry. Press it and the whole package goes through again from what's already been read, which is quick. Your answers and edits are kept, as always.

Removing a file asks whether the rooms that came only from it should go too, and lists any rooms you've edited as ones it's keeping. Those are yours now, whatever they came from.

Next steps

Photos still help — see Adding photos and videos — and anything you say in a voice note outranks what's printed on a sheet. To correct a number by hand, see Editing project dimensions.