Room sizes now come off the sheet that draws the room biggest

A builder's package usually draws every room twice. Once on the overall plan, where the whole house fits on one sheet and each bathroom is the size of a postage stamp. And once on its own detail set — a sheet for the primary suite, a sheet for baths 3 and 4, a sheet for the pool bath — where that one room fills the paper and every wall is drawn twice as big.

Those are the same room, so you get one card for it, and that hasn't changed. What's changed is which of the two sheets the size gets read off.

Before: the size was always read off the overall plan, because that's the sheet the card was built from. On a room the overall plan labels but the detail set doesn't, that worked. On everything else it either produced a rough number off a very small drawing, or — far more often — produced nothing at all, because there was nothing on that sheet to measure around. On a recent nine-set package, five of the seven bathroom floors came back with no starting size whatsoever.

Now: each room is measured on whichever of its sheets draws it largest. On that same package all seven bathroom floors come back with a starting number, and thirteen of the fourteen rooms measured are read off a detail sheet rather than the overall plan.

It's still a starting point, not a measurement

Nothing here changes the rule: a size read off a drawing arrives as a suggestion on the card for you to accept, change or ignore — never as a number that quietly prices the job. Two things got stricter about saying so:

• Door and window tags are no longer mistaken for dimensions. The four-digit codes architects print beside every opening look exactly like the numbers a reader is asked to find. They're now refused outright, because a tag read as a measurement makes a bathroom a hundred feet across.
• A size only claims to come from a printed dimension when it actually did. Detail sheets often print no overall width and depth for a room at all. A size worked out from the drawn shape is labelled as the estimate it is, so a number that looks more solid than it is can't slip past you.

What to expect on your next plan read

• More rooms with a size to check, especially bathrooms in packages that include per-room detail sets.
• Sizes on those rooms that are usually within a third of the finished area, and sometimes much closer. Treat every one as a starting point — check it against the drawing before you price it.
• A room the drawings never label on any sheet still comes back without a size, and still tells you why.

Existing projects pick this up on the next Re-read documents.