How to bid flooring work as a subcontractor

What you are actually bidding

A flooring invitation reads like one number and is really five or six packages stapled together. Division 09 splits the work across separate sections, and money leaks at the seams:

• 09 65 00 Resilient Flooring. Sheet vinyl, LVT, VCT, rubber and linoleum, plus resilient base and accessories under 09 65 13.
• 09 68 00 Carpeting. Broadloom and carpet tile, which are not the same takeoff.
• 09 30 00 Tiling. Ceramic, porcelain and stone, with the setting bed, membranes and grout.
• 09 64 00 Wood Flooring and 09 67 00 Fluid-Applied Flooring, which is where resinous and epoxy systems live.

Then there are the boundaries that actually decide the outcome.

Floor preparation. This is the largest single source of change orders in flooring work, and it is almost never drawn. The spec usually says the substrate shall be prepared in accordance with the flooring manufacturer's written instructions, and it does not say by whom. Patching, grinding, shot blasting, crack chasing and self-leveling underlayment (03 54 00 Cast Underlayment) are real cost on a real slab. Decide whether you carry prep, to what starting condition, and put it in one sentence near the top of the proposal.

Moisture. On a slab on grade your adhesive bond depends on the slab drying, which is not your work and not your schedule. Testing is its own scope item, normally ASTM F1869 calcium chloride or ASTM F2170 in-situ relative humidity, and mitigation is a much bigger one. Price the tests as a line. Exclude mitigation, and give a unit price for it so a failed slab becomes a lookup instead of a fight.

Removal of existing finishes. On renovation, tear-out of existing flooring is 02 41 19 Selective Demolition, not flooring, and GCs routinely assume the flooring sub cleans its own substrate anyway. If you are doing it, price residue removal separately from tear-out, because old cutback adhesive and black mastic turn a scrape into a hazardous-material conversation that is nobody's line item until it stops the job.

Base, transitions and the long tail. Wall base, reducers, transition strips, thresholds, stair treads, nosings and edge trim. Small unit prices, large quantities, frequently silent in the bid.

Two more grey zones: sealed and polished concrete can sit with the concrete sub under 03 35 00 Concrete Finishing or land in your package, and waterproofing membrane under tile in wet areas can be specified inside the tile section or in the waterproofing section. Both get assumed onto flooring by default.

Read the drawings for your sheets

• The finish schedule is your bill of materials. Floor finish, base type and base height, room by room, plus the remarks column where the exceptions hide.
• The finish plans are your quantities. Pattern, plank direction, borders, feature areas and the exact location of every material transition.
• When the schedule and the plan disagree, both are still your problem. They disagree constantly, usually because a room changed type late in design. Take off both, bid the higher, and put the delta in your clarifications as a question. Silently bidding the cheaper one is how you buy the difference.
• The door schedule carries thresholds and transitions. Count one per opening where finishes change, then check the frame detail for width.
• Structural sheets tell you about the substrate. Depressed slabs and recesses for thickset tile, elevated deck versus slab on grade, and the control joints that have to be honoured with a movement joint through the tile assembly rather than tiled over.
• Enlarged plans and interior elevations carry tile layout origin, coursing and wet-area details.
• Plumbing plans show floor drains, which mean slope, which means a mud bed, which is labour the flat-area takeoff does not contain.
• The specifications carry attic stock, protection, warranty, ambient temperature requirements, substrate tolerance and moisture test frequency. Read concrete curing requirements in the concrete section too, because a slab cured with a membrane-forming compound has to be mechanically removed before anything gets glued to it, and that grinding is prep nobody priced.

Getting the quantities right

Flooring is bid in mixed units, and mixing them up is the fastest way to look unserious:

• Resilient, tile and wood: net floor area by room, split by product, colour and pattern.
• Broadloom carpet: square yards, area divided by 9. Carpet tile stays in square feet.
• Base and transitions: linear feet.
• Thresholds, nosings and corner pieces: each.
• Resinous systems: gallons per coat, derived from the coverage rate at the specified film build.

What the obvious area takeoff misses:

1. Pattern and directional waste. Herringbone, diagonal and ashlar layouts cut differently from straight lay, and plank direction that changes between rooms creates cuts at every doorway. Carry a waste factor per layout type, derived from your own installed history, not one blended number.
2. Roll geometry, the item that actually hurts. Broadloom comes in a fixed roll width, commonly 12 ft. A 13 ft corridor is not 13 ft of carpet, it is a full-width run plus a filler strip plus a seam, and pile direction dictates which way the run goes. Broadloom waste is driven by room shape and roll width, not by area. Two subs can take off identical square footage and order yardage well apart from each other, and both be right.
3. Attic stock. The spec states the extra stock as a percentage or a carton count, and it is delivered in full cartons of every colour and dye lot. A 60 sf accent colour can force a full box or a mill minimum.
4. Prep is a quantity, not a contingency. Self-leveling underlayment is volume: area times average depth, and depth comes from actually surveying the slab, not from the drawings.
5. Base perimeter is not room perimeter. Deduct door openings, then add the perimeter of islands and freestanding casework, and count preformed corners and end stops as pieces.
6. Moisture tests are a count. The test standard sets the number of tests per area, so read it and price the tests, the probes and the return trips.

What the GC checks when leveling flooring bids

Bid leveling is the GC flattening every proposal onto one scope. Expect them to check:

• Units. A carpet number quoted per square yard against competitors quoting per square foot is the classic flooring leveling error, and it goes against you as often as for you.
• Prep: in or out, and from what starting condition.
• Moisture testing and mitigation, and who owns a failed slab.
• Demolition of existing finishes, residue removal and disposal.
• Base and transitions, by type and height.
• Attic stock quantities.
• Sealed or polished concrete, and waterproofing under tile.
• Protection of finished floors, temporary heat and building conditioning before install.
• Allowances and unit prices, so changes can be priced without re-bidding.

Structure the proposal

Five parts, in this order. The number, with the quantities by finish type and unit. Inclusions as items rather than prose. Exclusions, listed the same way, which is the most valuable section in the document. Clarifications and assumptions. Unit prices.

Put the tolerance in the assumptions, in numbers. The flatness tolerance in the flooring manufacturer's instructions and the tolerance in the concrete section are two different documents and they usually do not match, so a slab that passes the concrete spec can still be out of tolerance for a glue-down resilient product. State the tolerance you assumed, then give unit prices for skim coat, grind, self-leveler at a stated depth, mitigation coating, existing-finish demolition, base per linear foot and thresholds each. That converts a site argument into a change order.

Where this fits

Keep the takeoff that produced the numbers, room by room, tied to the finish schedule. When the GC calls to level, the sub who can open the takeoff and show which room and which sheet a quantity came from wins the conversation. Ruh reads the drawing set, measures the scope, and prices the measured quantities against your own price book, with every line traceable back to the sheet it came from.