A wall drawing is not a room on the job

A designer's package draws a wall view for almost everything: the shower, the vanity, the kitchen — and the closet, the office fireplace, the bench nook. Those wall views used to be enough on their own to put a room in your bid.

On a nineteen-room package that meant a Primary Closet card showed up with a hundred and eleven square feet of wall tile on it. Nobody is tiling that closet. The spec sheet never mentions it. The only reason it was there is that its elevation sheet prints the ceiling height beside the wall length, and that reads like a wall of tile if you don't know what you're looking at.

Now a wall drawing can only add size to a room that's already in the bid. The tile schedule puts a room in the bid, and so do the plans. A sheet for a room neither of them covers joins the more rooms — add any list underneath your rooms instead, with everything it printed waiting on it. Tap it and the room comes in, sizes and all. Nothing is thrown away and nothing arrives uninvited.

A ceiling height is a ceiling height

These sheets stamp 10'-0" CLG. HGT. on every view whether or not any tile reaches it. Sometimes it's printed on its own, and sometimes it's printed on the same line as the wall's length.

Either way it now means the same thing: how tall the room is, not how high the tile goes. For a shower that's the same number — a shower runs to the ceiling as a matter of course — but on a vanity wall, a laundry or an office it isn't, and multiplying by it was turning a wall into two or three times the tile it really has.

So the height that sizes a wall has to be the one that says it's the tile: 6'-0" to top of wall tile, tile to 96" A.F.F., top of backsplash. When a sheet prints only the ceiling, the wall's printed lengths still count toward the run — you'll see them quoted on the suggestion — but no size is offered until something on the drawings says where the tile stops. Fewer suggestions, and the ones you get are worth the tap.

The wall tile lands on the line that gets paid

When your schedule names exactly one tiled wall for a room, that's where the wall sizes go — including when the only one it names is the shower.

A guest bath on the same package had its shower walls scheduled and no wall tile at all, and every figure off its elevation sheet landed on an invented wall-tile line while the shower read nothing. Now the whole field lands on the shower, within a few feet of what the job actually billed. A room whose schedule names two tiled walls — a shower and a vanity wall — is left alone, because those are two real surfaces and picking one would be guessing.

Room 1 gets used up

Every new project starts with an empty Room 1. When you upload a set of plans and eighteen rooms come back, the first one now takes that empty card over instead of leaving it sitting at the top of the list with nothing in it.

A card you've already put something in — a photo, a note, a measurement, or a name you typed — is never taken over.