Chapter 7 Exercises

Work these with a real set if you can get one — your own job, a public agency's published bid documents, or the Willow Street package in Appendix K. Reading documents is a motor skill. You do not acquire it by reading about it.

Difficulty legend: ⭐ basic · ⭐⭐ applied · ⭐⭐⭐ judgment · ⭐⭐⭐⭐ extension

Selected answers appear in Appendix J.

Part A — Conceptual Understanding ⭐

A1. List the six families of documents that typically make up the contract documents. For each, state in one sentence what it governs that the others do not.

A2. State the division of labor between drawings and specifications in one sentence each. Then give two examples of information that lives only in the drawings and two that live only in the specifications.

A3. Name the three common order-of-precedence regimes and describe, for each, what you are permitted to resolve on your own versus what requires the architect.

A4. State the four internal precedence conventions that apply in most contracts regardless of the document hierarchy. Which two of the four are really about currency rather than about detail?

A5. Decode these sheet numbers without looking anything up: A-311, S-201, E-601, M-103, A-505. For each, say the discipline and the type of view.

A6. What is the difference between an addendum, an ASI, a bulletin, a construction change directive, and a change order? Which of the five is a directive you must proceed with before the price is agreed? Which one must you never build?

A7. Name the three parts of a CSI SectionFormat specification section and state what each is for in one sentence.

A8. Explain the difference between UniFormat and MasterFormat in terms of what question each answers and when in a project each is usable.

A9. Why is a geotechnical report frequently not a contract document, and what practical difference does that make when you price excavation?

A10. In your own words, why is "do not scale drawings" a rule rather than a suggestion? Give all three mechanisms.

A11. Define allowance, unit price, and alternate, and state which kind of uncertainty each one addresses. Which division of the project manual carries all three?

A12. If MasterFormat already covers every scope of work on a building, why does UniFormat exist at all? Answer in terms of when in a project each one becomes usable.

A13. A drawing sheet's title block carries four pieces of legal metadata that most readers skip. Name them, and state what goes wrong if each one is ignored.

A14. What is the difference between plan north and true north, and name two decisions that depend on each.

Part B — Applied Analysis ⭐⭐

B1. A subcontractor tells you at a coordination meeting that "the drawings clearly show a mechanically attached roof, so that's what I bid." Section 07 54 00 requires a fully adhered system with a 20-year no-dollar-limit warranty. Walk through your analysis: which document governs, what you say in the meeting, what you write afterward, and what you check before you say anything at all.

B2. Your contract's supplementary conditions state that "the more stringent requirement shall govern." Your estimator's bid file contains a note reading: "Spec 09 21 16 wants 2 layers at 2-hr walls, dwgs show 1. Carried 1 layer. Upside if we get asked." You find this note in week 3, after award. What is your obligation, what are the risks of each course of action, and what do you actually do?

B3. A civil drawing shows the site sanitary line stopping 5 feet outside the building. The plumbing drawing shows the interior sanitary line starting at the building face. Explain what has happened, which subcontract this scope belongs in, how you would discover it before award, and what it costs to discover it after.

B4. You are handed a 1,900-page project manual and told you have one day. Describe exactly what you read, in what order, and why — and name three specific things you are looking for that carry a date rather than a dollar.

B5. An ASI arrives revising a ceiling height in four rooms, with a cover note stating "no cost or time impact." The ductwork above those ceilings is installed. Write the substance of your written response, and state the deadline pressure you are operating under and where you would find it.

B6. Compare a prescriptive specification, a performance specification, and a closed proprietary specification for the same product — a curtain-wall system. For each, say who owns the risk that the installed system fails to perform, and what that means for how you price it.

B7. The architectural grid and the structural grid disagree by 3/8" at grid line A. Layout for the curtain wall starts Monday. Explain why this is urgent, what it becomes if it is not resolved, and what you do today.

B8. Your reflected ceiling plan shows a 2×2 acoustic grid in a corridor. The mechanical plan shows a duct main at an elevation that leaves 4 inches of clearance above that grid. The lighting plan shows recessed troffers requiring 8 inches. Identify the three documents in conflict, state which review pass from §7.10 would have found it, and describe the two possible resolutions and their relative cost.

B9. Section 07 27 00 states an air-leakage performance requirement for the completed exterior wall assembly and requires field testing to demonstrate compliance, at the contractor's cost, with remediation and retesting if the assembly fails. The drawings show the barrier's location and its terminations. Answer three things: (a) who owns the risk that the installed assembly fails the test, and why; (b) what you must have in place before the first square foot of barrier is installed to protect yourself; and (c) how the presence of a required mockup changes your answer to (b).

B10. Your project manual's Division 01 requires the contractor to engage and pay an independent testing and inspection agency for the duration of the work. Your estimator carried nothing for this because on the last three jobs the owner engaged the testing agency. The job is 14 months. Estimate the exposure, explain why the estimator's assumption was reasonable and still wrong, and describe the one habit that prevents this category of error permanently.

B11. A subcontractor's bid clarification letter states: "Excludes any scope not shown on drawings." Explain, in terms of this chapter, precisely why that sentence is dangerous to accept, and write the one-sentence response you would send before award.

Part C — Calculations & Deliverables ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

C1 — Price the discrepancy. A wall section shows 2" of continuous insulation; the specification requires R-15 continuous, which needs 3" of the specified product. The building has 21,000 SF of this assembly, 138 precast panels, and 86 openings. Using $1.85/SF for the added insulation, $0.95/SF for longer clips and girts, $145 per panel for connection revisions, $110 per opening for revised returns, and $7,800 lump sum for shop-drawing rework, calculate the total exposure. Then state what percentage of the total is the insulation itself, and explain to a skeptical owner why the other 60% is real.

C2 — Price it both ways. The same conflict, found two ways. In preconstruction: a scope delta of $18,900 plus $1,300 of staff time. In the field at week 58, with 14,000 SF installed: the same $18,900 scope delta, plus removal and reinstallation at $6.80/SF over 14,000 SF, plus $22,400 of water-test remediation, plus $8,600 of architect's supplemental service, plus 11 calendar days of critical-path delay at Northgate's total daily exposure rate. Calculate both totals and the ratio. State the daily rate you used and where it comes from.

C3 — The corridor. 1,180 LF of corridor partition, 10 ft high, currently built with one layer of 5/8" Type X each side. The AHJ requires two layers each side. Price the correction after finishes are complete, using: $2.65/SF for the added layer (both faces), $3.40/SF to remove and reinstall 11,600 SF of ceiling grid and tile, $118 each to re-firestop 214 penetrations, $1.95/SF to re-tape and repaint, $640 each to replace 46 door frames, $6,800 for re-inspection, and 7 calendar days of delay at Northgate's daily exposure rate. Then answer: why do the door frames have to be replaced?

C4 — Count the openings. From this door schedule fragment, determine the number of door leaves, frames, and hardware sets. Then state one quantity you cannot determine and where it lives.

C5 — Build a discrepancy log. Using the ten-field format from §7.10, log five real discrepancies from any set you can obtain. Every field must be filled in, including a dollar exposure for each — estimate it if you must, but write a number. A discrepancy with no number attached will not get anyone's attention.

C6 — Write the RFI. Take the highest-value item from C5 and write the complete RFI. It must include: RFI number, date issued, required response date, discipline, location by grid and level, every document reference by sheet and revision or section and article, the question stated without argument, your suggested resolution, and separate schedule-impact and cost-impact statements. Keep it under one page.

C7 — The ten-minute section read, applied. Below is a described outline of a specification section for architectural precast concrete. You have ten minutes. Using the method and time budget from §7.6, extract the five things that will actually affect your job, in the order the method finds them — and for each, state whether it costs money, time, or both.

C8 — Crosswalk both formats. Take the exterior enclosure of a building you know. Write the UniFormat Level 2/3 elements that describe it (B2010 Exterior Walls, B2020 Exterior Windows, B3010 Roof Coverings, and so on). Then, for each element, list every MasterFormat section that would be needed to actually specify it, and every separate subcontract that would be needed to actually buy it. Circle each boundary between two subcontracts. Those circles are your scope-gap hunting list for buyout.

C9 — Order-of-precedence memo. Obtain a real construction contract — AIA A201, ConsensusDocs, EJCDC, or a public agency's published general conditions are all freely findable. Locate the article that addresses conflicts among the contract documents. Write a one-page memo that (a) quotes the clause verbatim, (b) classifies it into one of the three regimes from §7.2, (c) states the notice period for objecting to a directive you believe carries cost or time, and (d) gives your superintendent a plain-English decision rule for 6:40 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Part D — Judgment & Ethics ⭐⭐⭐

D1. During bidding on a hard-bid public job, your estimator identifies an obvious conflict between the drawings and the specifications worth roughly $140,000. Your options: (a) ask the question in writing before bid, which alerts every competitor and probably produces an addendum that raises everyone's price; (b) price the low reading, say nothing, and claim after award; (c) price the low reading, disclose the assumption in your bid as a written clarification. Analyze all three commercially, contractually, and ethically. Which do you do, and what would change your answer?

D2. Your superintendent tells you he "already knows" the corridor is 2-hour because he built the same architect's last three buildings, and asks you not to slow him down with an RFI. He is probably right. Give three reasons to write the RFI anyway, and one circumstance under which you would agree with him.

D3. You discover in week 12 that a specification section requires an expensive field test that nobody carried in the estimate and that the owner has clearly never thought about. The owner would probably never notice if you skipped it. What do you do, and what is the actual downstream cost of skipping it?

D4. A subcontractor submits a substitution request for a product that will save $8,000. Pursuing it will cost roughly $5,910 in soft costs and 21 days of review time, and the item is not on the critical path. The subcontractor keeps pushing because their savings is real and your cost is not on their books. How do you decide, and how do you explain the decision to them in a way that preserves the relationship?

D5. Kestrel's assistant superintendent framed 3,180 LF from a superseded sheet, costing $340,282, in part because schedule compression made the shortcut rational. You are writing the lessons-learned report that Nadia Haddad will read. Do you name schedule compression as a contributing cause? Write the two sentences you would actually put in the report, and defend them.

D6. You have found a discrepancy worth roughly $90,000 in the owner's favor — the drawings show more than the specification requires, and the specification governs under your contract. Nobody has noticed. Your project executive says: "Don't write that one up. If we open that door, they'll go looking for the ones that run the other way." Analyze this. What is the actual contractual exposure of staying silent, what does it do to your credibility with the architect on the next forty RFIs, and what do you say to your executive?

D7. A rated-assembly discrepancy sits unresolved and the AHJ inspection is in six days. Your superintendent proposes building the more expensive version now and sorting the paperwork out afterward, on the theory that "nobody ever got sued for building it stronger." Identify the two things wrong with that reasoning — one commercial, one about life safety — and state what you do instead.

Part M — Mixed / Interleaved Practice ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

M1 — With Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. The same drawing-versus-specification conflict appears on three jobs: Northgate (CM at Risk, GMP), Rivermont Elementary (design-bid-build lump sum), and a hypothetical design-build version of Northgate. For each, state who owns the cost, what the contractor's leverage is, and when the contractor first had the opportunity to find it.

M2 — With Chapter 4. Division 01 carries allowances, alternates, and unit prices. For a $6.8M community center: give one scope you would handle with an allowance, one with a unit price, and one as an alternate. Justify each choice by naming exactly which kind of uncertainty it addresses.

M3 — With Chapter 6. Take Dani's eleven-item discrepancy log from the chapter. Decide which items close out with an RFI and which belong on the project risk register. For each register item, assign a probability, an impact in dollars, an owner, and a response strategy in the format you built in Chapter 6.

M4 — With Chapter 6 and Chapter 25. Item 7 on Dani's log — a required, water-tested envelope mockup that appears on no drawing — carried $47,000 and a five-week lead. Explain why a schedule risk found in week 6 and the identical risk found in week 40 belong in different rows of a risk register, and what specifically changes between those two dates.

M5 — With Chapter 12. Northgate's canonical gypsum board quantity is 412,000 SF across all faces and all layers, against 18,600 LF of interior metal-stud partition. Reconstruct how a takeoff gets from the linear footage to the square footage. Name every document you must open to do it correctly, and identify the two that a careless estimator will skip.

M6 — With Chapter 5. A specification section requires compliance with a published reference standard but does not state an edition. The standard has been revised twice since the design began. Explain the exposure this creates, what you write, and why "the edition in effect on the date of the Agreement" is a phrase worth looking for in Part 1 of every section you read.

Part E — Research & Extension ⭐⭐⭐⭐

E1 — Go find a real set. Public owners — school districts, municipalities, state agencies, transit authorities — routinely publish complete bid documents online, including the full project manual. Download one. Then: (a) build the drawing index; (b) find and transcribe the order-of-precedence clause; (c) read Division 01 completely and list every obligation in it that carries a cost or a date; (d) write a one-page memo to a hypothetical project executive titled "What This Job Will Cost Us That Isn't On a Drawing."

E2 — Compare three contract forms. Obtain the publicly available general-conditions documents from three different families — an AIA form, a ConsensusDocs form, and a public agency's own general conditions. Compare how each handles: (a) conflicts among the contract documents, (b) the contractor's duty to review documents and report discrepancies, and (c) the notice period for claims arising from a discrepancy. Present the comparison as a table and state which you would rather work under, and why.

E3 — Trace a reference standard. Pick one reference standard cited in a real specification section — an ACI, ASTM, AISC, or NFPA document. Find out: how long it is, what edition is current, what it costs to obtain, what testing or submittal obligations it imposes, and whether the building code adopted in your jurisdiction references the same edition. Write 500 words on what it means that a single line in a specification made all of that binding on the contractor.