The rooms you do not tile are offered, not added

A builder's finish schedule covers the whole house. The theater's wall-to-wall carpet and the gym's rubber floor sit on the same sheet as the bathrooms' tile, because one sheet is how the designer keeps track of every finish going into the job — not because any of it is yours.

Biddy used to read that sheet as a list of rooms to bid. So a nineteen-room package came back with a Theater and a Gym on it, and the first thing you had to do on a fresh job was notice two rooms you never quoted and delete them.

Now a room whose every line is somebody else's material is offered instead of added. Carpet, rubber, wood and hardwood flooring, luxury vinyl and laminate, wallpaper, paint, mirror, countertop slab — a room built entirely from those doesn't come into the bid. It's still there, with everything the schedule ordered for it, so if you do carry that trade you can take it in with a tap.

Any tile at all keeps the whole room. A kitchen whose floor is hardwood and whose backsplash is tile is a tile room, and the hardwood line stays on it — that's the line that tells you which floor not to price.

When it can't tell, it keeps the room. A product named for a look rather than a material — wood-look plank, wood grain — is tile, and so is anything the reader doesn't recognise. Carrying one extra room you can decline is a much smaller problem than dropping a room you were meant to price.

And a flooring line with no room stops asking you where it goes. Wood flooring — see flooring plan for locations used to come to you as "which room is this for?", which is a question a tile contractor can't answer usefully and whose every answer puts the floor guy's work in your bid. Lines like that are left alone now.

Fewer answers to read on the checks that remain

When the plans show two rooms called exactly what the schedule called them — a Kitchen 102 and a Kitchen 134 — that's a real question, and you get the two of them.

What you no longer get beside them is the rooms that only sound alike. Outdoor Kitchen and Back Kitchen used to be offered as answers to "which room is Kitchen on the plans?" even though a room named with extra words is a different room once a plainly named one exists. Now the check offers the two kitchens and nothing else.

Nothing else about the checks has changed: a room with one close match and a few near-misses still shows you all of them, and None of these and Not sure — skip are where they always were.