Bid sheets from the paint finish schedule, by surface and system, with every conflict listed for your estimator.

A school addition or hospital wing reaches your desk as a finish schedule with a code in each room's wall and ceiling columns, a door and frame schedule on another sheet, and a painting section that says what each code is made of. Somebody reads all three, turns codes into systems, decides what is yours and what belongs to another trade, and writes the list of things the bid leaves out. Most of the risk sits where those documents don't line up.

For the test, AI reads copies of those documents and drafts the bid sheet: each surface with its code, primer and finish coats, gloss, door and frame treatment, and whether exposed structure or wall covering is in or out, each line citing its sheet or section. Every room, tag or surface the documents disagree on goes on its own list. It writes no price and sends nothing.

The word on the schedule isn't always the gloss in the section. MPI gloss levels run from 1 to 7 on readings at 60 and 85 degrees, and the names attached to them drift. Texas State University calls Level 3 eggshell and Level 2 a high-side sheen flat, while the University of Colorado's Anschutz Medical Campus accepts eggshell as Level 2 or Level 3, each with its own MPI number. Anschutz also writes gloss as Level 6 with a floor of 65 units at 60 degrees, below the 70 to 85 units Texas State's definition gives. The draft carries the level the section names beside the word the schedule used, and lists any pair that doesn't match.

A system gets counted coat by coat, and some coats are someone else's. Anschutz writes most systems as a prime coat, an intermediate coat matching the topcoat and a topcoat, and reserves its dry-fall systems for overhead work, with the prime coat on that steel coming as a shop primer under Division 05. Northwestern University sends shop priming of structural steel, metal fabrications, stairs and railings to those trades' sections, and lets the painter drop a scheduled primer on factory-primed items if the topcoat maker accepts it. The University of Houston's hollow metal section lists the exposed finish on its door and frame types as prime. The draft counts each coat the section requires, says who applies it, and lists any primer it can't place.

Doors and frames have their own rulebook. New York State's 2024 master spec paints them the color of the adjacent wall in the next highest gloss, unless noted, and when a wall changes color from one side of a frame to the other, the color changes at the inside corner of the frame stop. Non-ferrous hardware, frame mutes and weather stripping stay unpainted. MPI's April 2022 interior guide makes semi-gloss, its G5, the default on doors, frames and trim unless noted or scheduled, has doors taken down to reach their top and bottom edges and then rehung, and wants rating and instruction labels protected. A 2023 Mississippi school addendum simply says new wood doors are painted to match existing ones. Every opening goes on the sheet with its door, frame and edge treatment.

Exposed structure and wall covering turn on a single sentence. That same addendum says all exposed structural elements are to be painted unless noted otherwise. PCA P23, the Painting Contractors Association's standard on implied exclusions, leaves exposed steel and concrete ceilings, ducts, conduit and sprinkler piping out of a painter's scope unless the documents explicitly say otherwise, and New York lists top flanges of composite beams among items not to be painted. Northwestern keeps one list for equipment rooms and another for occupied spaces. Wall covering splits the other way: MPI's guide has the painter prepare and prime surfaces for it, and the University of Houston wants that primer mildew resistant and recommended in writing by the wall-covering maker, so the goods can be excluded while the primer stays in. The draft quotes the sentence that settles each item, or says none does.

Tags, addenda and measuring rules decide the rest. Addendum 2 for Belmont Cragin Elementary School, from Chicago's Public Building Commission in April 2021, added PT-9 to the finish schedule, moved a lounge wall from PT-5 to PT-4 and revised WC-2 as window coverings, while its plumbing sheets use WC-2 as a fixture tag. PCA P10 measures open web joists as if solid, doubling the area when both sides are finished, and deducts openings of 100 square feet or more. PCA P3 grades color from Level I, one color for a whole project, to Level IV, unlimited colors, and says material cost rises as colors deepen; the Mississippi sheet leaves its two paint colors to the architect. Your reviewer will look first at rooms found on one document only, gloss words that don't match the section, primers with no owner, exposed items with no sentence behind them, and tags read outside their own legend.

After your reviewer's yes, finish schedules out for bid run through the same job for about 30 days.

Your estimator approves every bid sheet before a number is written, and your team still sends every proposal.

You fix the live job's price before signing. Anything after it is priced alone, and monthly support begins once a job is running.