Contractors don't all send the same kind of package, and three real ones came in this week that we read badly. All three read right now.
A designer's spec sheet is not a room list. These come one product per page with a heading over each — LOCATION: BACK KITCHEN, ALL OVER FLOORING. We were taking those headings literally, so a nine-room house arrived with eleven rooms, three of which were headings. The heading comes off now: LOCATION: BACK KITCHEN is the back kitchen, and ALL OVER FLOORING becomes a question — Which room is this for? — instead of a room called ALL OVER FLOORING.
A takeoff photographed and sent as a PNG is a takeoff. We were reading the word TAKEOFF off the sheet and still filing it as a schedule, and a takeoff read as a schedule turns every row title into a room — one job came in with fifty-six rooms for a twenty-three-room house, including one called Guest Bathroom 6 Pony Wall and Shower Walls. It gets filed correctly now, which also means its waste footnote gets read, so the numbers you see are install square footage rather than order quantities.
Every surface lands somewhere the bid can price it. A few odd lines used to end up on surfaces nothing downstream could read — a Herringbone Inlay floating on its own, a surface named after the room it was in. An inlay is the floor it decorates. A row that names a product without saying which surface it goes on says exactly that, on the list of things to check, instead of inventing a surface for it.
Your interior elevations and render sheets get read for sizes. That's where the wall runs and tile heights are printed, and until now nothing opened them. Where a sheet prints a wall's run and its height, or a room's dimensions, you get a one-tap check with the figures quoted:
Bath Three floor: the elevations add up to 81.6 sq ft — use that? · 71-1/2" × 164-1/4"
Accept it and it's your number. Only what the sheet actually prints is ever offered — nothing is scaled off a drawing — and a surface you've already measured is never asked about.