A construction bid should be a document you can sit down with, read line by line, and check against your own house. Ours is written to be read that way. If a homeowner cannot point at a line and know exactly which cabinet, which tile, which fixture, and which piece of labor it refers to, we have not done our job.
That is a higher bar than the industry’s habit, and it is only reachable because of when we produce the document. We do not bid a project we have not designed. Every section below exists because the design phase already answered the question it depends on.
What does a remodel bid actually contain?
Ours opens with scope — a written description of the project that says what is included and, just as importantly, what is not. The exclusions list is not a defensive gesture. It is the part that prevents an argument in week six, because it puts in writing that the deck, the garage door, or the exterior paint you were quietly hoping might get folded in is not part of this contract.
From there, the bid follows the actual sequence of the build:
- Protection and site setup. Floor protection over the original fir you are keeping, dust barriers with negative air where we are opening walls, the path the crew uses in and out, and daily cleanup.
- Demolition and disposal. What comes out, how it leaves, and the container it leaves in — including a street-use permit if the container has to sit in the public right-of-way, which on most Seattle blocks it does.
- Structural work. Any beam, post, header, or footing, sized to the engineer’s drawing rather than to a guess.
- Framing. New walls, furring, blocking for whatever gets hung on a wall later, and any subfloor work.
- Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing rough-in. Circuit counts, panel work, duct runs, the ventilation route to the exterior, supply and drain lines to their new locations.
- Insulation, drywall, and plaster repair. Including how we are joining new drywall to existing plaster-and-lath, which is a real line of labor in an older house and not a rounding error.
- Cabinetry. The specific manufacturer or shop, the door style, the finish, the box construction, and the cabinet schedule from the drawings.
- Countertops. The named material, the edge profile, the seam locations, the cutouts.
- Tile and waterproofing. The tile itself, the setting pattern, the grout, and the waterproofing assembly behind it, listed separately because they are separate work.
- Plumbing and lighting fixtures. By model number and by count. Not “allowance for lighting.”
- Finish carpentry, doors, and hardware. Trim profiles, door slabs and hardware, cabinet hardware by quantity.
- Paint. Which surfaces, which sheens, how many coats.
- Flooring. Including subfloor preparation, transitions, and refinishing of any existing floor we are keeping.
- Appliances. With it stated plainly whether we are supplying them or you are, and what the installation includes.
- Permits and inspections. The SDCI permit itself, the time to obtain it, and coordination of the inspections it triggers.
- Project management and supervision. The scheduling, the trade coordination, the site visits, and the single point of contact you actually call.
Alongside those, the bid carries a schedule, a payment schedule tied to construction milestones rather than to the calendar, a written change-order procedure, and the warranty.
Why does every material have a name in our bid?
Because a material without a name is a placeholder, and placeholders move. An allowance for tile is a number chosen before anyone knows which tile — and the moment the real selection happens, the number changes. That change arrives as a bill, weeks after the homeowner believed the price was settled.
The way out of that is not a better allowance. It is finishing the selections before the number is written. By the time we produce a bid, you have chosen the tile, the slab, the faucet, the pulls, and the light over the island. Those choices are in the document with their names attached. There is nothing left to true up later, which is the difference between a bid and an estimate that we wrote about in the language of bids versus estimates.
What does the bid say about work you will never see?
A great deal, and it is the section homeowners find most reassuring once they understand it. The waterproofing behind a shower wall, the blocking behind drywall so a heavy mirror has something to fasten to, the insulated duct carrying moisture out of a damp house, the new circuits replacing what was left behind by knob-and-tube — all of it is written down.
In houses built in the 1920s and 1930s, this is also where we account for what we found during design rather than what we hope to find during construction. We investigate before we price. That is why our bids can name the beam and the footing rather than reserving the right to discuss it later.
What does a thin bid leave out?
When a bid is a single page and a lump sum, the omissions are usually the same ones:
- Allowances standing in for real selections, especially tile, lighting, plumbing fixtures, and countertops.
- No exclusions list, so the boundary of the project is undefined.
- Permit fees, permit time, and engineering treated as the homeowner’s problem.
- Subfloor preparation, plaster patching, and disposal left unmentioned — all near-certain in an older Seattle house.
- No supervision or project management line, which usually means coordination will be improvised.
- Payments tied to dates instead of milestones, so money moves ahead of progress.
- No written change-order procedure, which is precisely the document you need on the day something changes.
- A schedule expressed as a season rather than a sequence.
A thin bid is not necessarily dishonest. Frequently it is simply the only thing that can be written when a project has not been designed yet. That is the real problem, and it is the one our process is built to solve.
Why can we only write this after design?
Every line above depends on a decision that design makes. The framing line depends on the plan. The electrical line depends on the lighting layout. The cabinetry line depends on the elevations. The tile line depends on the pattern. Ask for a number before those exist and you are asking someone to invent it.
So we run design first — layout, selections, drawings, investigation of what is behind the finishes — and then we produce one fixed price for construction that you see before you sign anything. If you want the full mechanics of that, our pillar piece on how a fixed-price remodel bid works explains why it is only possible in that order, and our design-build process shows where in the sequence it lands.
The by-product is speed. When every selection is named and every rough-in is drawn, the trades stop waiting on decisions, and you get your house back sooner.
If you have a bid in front of you and cannot tell what it actually covers, bring it to us and we will read it with you. Then let us show you what ours looks like for your project — designed first, priced exactly, no allowances left hanging. Talk it through with NOR Design & Construction at a design consultation, or call 206.979.3420.
