A designer's spec sheet is read as your tile schedule

Interior designers rarely call it a schedule. The sheet says Specifications across the top, then Flooring & Wall Tile, then a table: where each finish goes, a picture of it, the tile's name and size, who sells it, the item number, the colour, the grout. To a tile contractor that is the schedule — it's the only document on the job that says what goes where.

And right above the table, nearly every one of them prints the same note: Contractor is responsible for all take-offs.

That note is the designer telling you the sheet has no quantities on it. Biddy read it the other way round. It saw the word, filed seven pages of tile selections as a quantity take-off, went looking for square footages, found none — and quietly landed nothing. The rooms came off the plans with no tile in them, and the Plans card kept asking for a schedule that was sitting right there in the upload.

Three things changed.

Fine print can't name a sheet any more. A line set in the same small type as the rest of the notes, on a page that has a real heading above it, is a note. It doesn't get to decide what the page is — and a sentence about take-offs never counts as a take-off, however it's typeset.

The table speaks for itself. A header that says where a finish goes and at least two things about what it is — vendor, item number, product, colour, grout — is a tile schedule, whatever the sheet is titled. Plumbing and lighting spec sheets use the same layout, so Biddy also looks for a grout column or a tile heading before it claims the page.

A sheet that reads wrong gets a second look. If a page is ever read as a take-off and comes back with a product on every row and not one quantity anywhere, it's read again as the schedule it obviously is. The mirror of this already existed for take-offs that were mistaken for schedules; now it works in both directions.

Spec sheets with boxed, wrapped cells — a long location running over four lines, a tile photo in the row — are also read from the page image rather than from the raw text, which used to break each wrapped line into a row of its own.

If you have a job where this happened, re-read the spec sheet and its rows will land on your rooms. Sizes still come from the plans or from you — a spec sheet tells you what the tile is, not how much of it there is.