Casework schedule quotes, drafted by room and elevation from the documents your estimator already reads.

A hospital renovation or a school addition reaches your bid desk as a plan set and a project manual. The casework schedule, where there is one, names units and finishes; the interior elevations show what goes on each wall; and the requirements sit in whichever section the architect chose. The same classroom cabinet lives in Section 06 45 00 in Albuquerque Public Schools' standard and in Section 12 30 00 in Worcester Public Schools' late 2024 replacement bid, while the University of Maryland keeps stock cabinets in 12 32 00 and Oregon State University wrote a control desk into 06 41 00.

For the test, AI reads copies of those documents and drafts the quote sheet room by room and elevation by elevation: each unit with its size and door and drawer layout, the laminate or veneer as the section writes it, hardware by unit, countertops and splashes, the grade called for, and a list of everything the documents leave open or disagree on, with the sheet or section named. It sets no price and sends nothing. Your reviewer holds each draft against the sheet your estimator built and the shop drawings the job ended up with.

A grade is set item by item. Oregon State's casework section for its Dixon Recreation Center, reissued with Addendum 1 in March 2023, builds cabinets and countertops to Architectural Woodwork Institute (AWI) Custom grade unless specified otherwise, then marks a wood bench, a wall panel and wood slats Premium, and warns that the contract documents go past the standard in places. Worcester's classroom casework section holds all joinery to Premium. Yale's design standard takes Custom as its default and then adds a separate list for the School of Medicine. The draft records the grade for each item as its section states it, with the section number beside it, and never rolls a job up to one grade.

The room changes the cabinet. Albuquerque's section builds office cabinets flush overlay and classroom cabinets reveal overlay, holds wall and base units to 32 inches wide except sink bases and map drawer cabinets, and changes the toe base core in rooms with floor drains. Worcester wants thicker panels on doors more than 36 inches tall. Northern Arizona refuses particleboard for shelving with more than a 2-foot unsupported span, and Yale's medical school shelves are 1 inch thick with standards no more than 30 inches apart. Each unit on the draft stays tied to its room and elevation so rules like these land on the right lines, and any room the schedule and the elevations name differently goes on the open list.

One laminate standard, many ways of writing it. These sections all point to NEMA LD 3, the high-pressure decorative laminate standard, but the codes differ. Yale's medical school cabinets call for GP-50 with a BK20 backing sheet for balanced construction. Oregon State uses VGS on vertical faces, CLS on semi-exposed surfaces and BKL on concealed backs. Worcester's package writes GP48 and GP28 and still cites editions of the standard from 1991 and 1985. Albuquerque's counters are PF42, and absent other direction its section limits a project to four colors or patterns, one for cabinets and one for tops per elevation. Oregon State's first laminate line gives its color as TBD. The draft copies each code with its source and puts every unnamed color on the open list.

Hardware is a list of type numbers and conditions. ANSI/BHMA A156.9 is the cabinet hardware standard these sections cite. Type B01602 is a frameless concealed hinge in both the University of Maryland's section and Oregon State's, yet one asks for 170 degrees of opening and the other for 135. Maryland assigns 1HD-100 slides to box drawers up to 6 inches high and 24 wide and 1HD-200 to drawers beyond that, and wants two pulls on drawers wider than 24 inches. Albuquerque keys every lock in a room alike and different from the next room, with two master keys. Northern Arizona sets Type 2, institutional, as its floor. Case Western lists hinges, slides and locks by maker and model as a basis of design, subject to the owner's approval. The draft counts hardware per unit and per room, keeps the type number and condition on each line, and leaves every substitution to your estimator.

Tops, wet walls and what nobody wrote down. Northern Arizona keeps high-pressure laminate for ordinary counters and wants solid surface tops and backsplashes at lavatories, coffee bars and other spots that stay wet. Worcester asks for moisture-resistant MDF under countertops with sinks, and Albuquerque wants no top joints within 24 inches of a sink or knee space. Worcester's section also says outright that it makes no attempt to list every element of casework on the project, so the elevations have to fill that in, and it wants a complete 24-inch sample base cabinet, with top, door and drawer, as a verification sample. Your reviewer, usually the chief estimator or whoever wrote that bid, scores units counted, sizes, codes, hardware lines, grades, and each open item found or missed.

If your reviewer says yes against the success criteria, new bid sets get a draft sheet for about 30 days.

Your estimator checks every sheet and sets every price, and each quote still goes out from your team, the way it does today.

Its price gets fixed ahead of signing. Any next job is picked and priced on its own, with monthly support once one is running.