Wall sizes read off the elevations, the way you would read them

When a designer's package includes interior elevations, those sheets already carry the numbers you need for the walls: a chain of runs along the bottom of each view, and the tile height up the side. Biddy was reading the sheet and then only using the odd figure that happened to be written as one string — so a primary shower whose two pages print seven wall runs against a stated ten-foot ceiling came back as 13 square feet. That's the one return panel by the door. The real field is over a hundred.

Now the runs get added up and multiplied by the height the sheet says the tile stops at — the same two numbers off the same drawing, in the order you'd read them. The check on the card quotes both, so you can see the sum before you accept it:

Primary bath shower walls — 111 sq ft from 11'-1" of printed wall at the 10'-0" ceiling. Use that?

On the test package, every wall surface moved a long way toward the figure that actually got priced. Four of them had been 70–90% low.

The height has to say it's the tile

Every one of these sheets prints a ceiling height whether or not any tile reaches it. So a ceiling height is only used for a shower, where tile to the ceiling is how it's done and the ceiling is the only height the sheet gives. Anywhere else, Biddy waits for a callout that actually names the tile — to top of wall tile, tile to 96" AFF, to top of backsplash. An office fireplace wall no longer gets priced as if it were tiled to the ceiling.

It also knows what isn't a run of wall:

• A doorway or a glass partition is a hole in the wall, not five feet of it.
• A valve or shower head height is just a note about where the valve goes — but the wall behind it still gets tiled, so that wall keeps its width.
• Where two tile heights are printed for one surface, that's a wainscot and a feature wall, not one number. You get the question instead of an average.

The surface you priced gets the whole field

A package names a room's wall tile once — backsplash on one job, wainscot on another, wall tile on a third — and that's the line with the money on it. The reader doesn't know which word your designer used, so it used to file what it found under whichever one the drawing looked most like. On the test job the scheduled backsplash for a back kitchen came back at 13 sq ft while an invented wall tile held 81. Neither was useful. A pool bath put its whole read on a surface that wasn't even on the schedule, and the wainscot that was got nothing.

Now, when your schedule names exactly one wall surface in a room, that surface gets the whole field. If it names two — a wainscot and a backsplash — those are two real areas in two real places, and Biddy leaves them alone rather than picking for you.

A floor is never read off a wall drawing

An elevation draws a wall. It can't tell you the shape of the floor in front of it. One bath came back with a 168 sq ft floor that was really two door tags multiplied together — 3080 is a three-foot by eight-foot door, not a dimension — against a real 60.

Bare numbers like that are all over a set of drawings, and they're now recognised for what they are. A wall drawing no longer offers a floor size at all, and a floor plan only offers one when it prints both dimensions outright.

Fewer checks, and the ones left are worth a tap

On the test package the use that? checks went from sixteen to thirteen: the wrong floor is gone, and split surfaces are one check instead of two.

A number still only ever arrives as a suggestion you accept. Two things changed about how they're labelled:

• A wall read off one or two printed runs now says so. A bathroom has more than one tiled wall, so a field built from one run is a floor under the real number, not a measurement of it. Those arrive marked for a second look.
• Nothing is more than double off without that mark. Seven of the sixteen suggestions on the test job used to be, presented as if they were solid.

Sizes read off the drawing itself

Separately: every sheet in a set prints its own scale in the title block, and that scale is the only thing that lets Biddy measure a room off the drawing when no dimensions are printed near it. On a nine-set package it was printed on all 74 pages and picked up on three — including the sheets plotted sideways, and the ones that write 1'-0" in pieces.

All 74 read now. That doesn't put new sizes on your cards on its own — it's the groundwork for reading the rooms that print no dimensions at all, which is the next piece. Rooms still need you to confirm a size before it's used for pricing.