A schedule written in codes now lands as tile on surfaces

Some architects don't print products on the room schedule. They print codes:

…and the tile itself is on a card in the interior designer's specification book, alongside forty others.

Read on its own, that schedule told us nothing. TL-10 isn't a surface and isn't a product, so every room came back with a box on it labelled TL-10 and a question: Is "TL-10" part of your bid? On a real house that was fifty of those questions — the same seven questions, asked once per room.

What happens now

We read the spec book's cards and match them to the codes. The card for TL-10 reads:

VILLAGIO — Lightyear Porcelain Tile #VIDE7 SIZE: 48" × 48"; COLOR: PEARL; LOCATION: FLOORING

That last cell is the one that was missing. It's the designer saying where the tile goes, so Bed 3 comes back with a floor carrying the Villagio tile, its size and its colour — not a box called TL-10.

Bath 3 gets two surfaces, because its schedule names two tiles: a floor (TL-10, the same porcelain as the rest of the house) and a shower floor (TL-21, the Bedrosians mosaic its card places in Bath 3 shower floor).

Grout rides with its tile

GR-29 under TL-10 is the grout for that floor, not a second thing to tile. It comes back as a note on the surface — Grout GR-29 — Custom Building Products, Cape Gray #546 — instead of a surface of its own. Before, every grout code was another box and another question.

Codes that aren't yours are left alone

A finish schedule covers the whole house. The wallpaper, the lighting, the cabinet paint and the plumbing fixtures all have codes on the same sheet. Those are somebody else's scope: they don't get a surface and they don't get a question. Same for a stone the book puts on counters — that's a fabricator's worktop, and it stays off your bid.

One question per code, not one per room

If a code appears in the schedule and nothing anywhere in the set says what it is, you still get asked — once for the whole package, naming the rooms it turns up in:

Nothing in the set says what "TL-37" is — is it part of your bid? Listed in Laundry · Bath 3 · Powder

Two more things you'll see

Tile the set spec'd but never put in a room is reported in one line in the document notes, with the codes listed. On a real package that's usually a genuine gap worth a call to the designer — a shower-wall tile that's specified and never assigned.

A finish placed by its code alone says so. If a card names a product but never says where it goes, we put it on the room's floor, mark it as needing a look, and tell you which codes we did that to.

Projects read before today keep what they had. Re-analyze the plans to pick this up.