United States The document matters as much as the drawing.
An American millwork submittal is judged against a written standard, a specification section and a reviewer who will check the claim rather than take it. Getting the drawing right matters less than getting the document right.
What this market expects
- Imperial throughout.
- Not converted, not mixed. A metric dimension on a US submittal is an immediate signal that the set came from somewhere that does not work here.
- AWI grade obligations understood as cost, not description.
- Grade governs substrate, edge banding, joint quality and the permitted gaps between doors and their frames. It also sets which surfaces count as exposed, semi-exposed and concealed, and those carry different obligations on the same item.
- Division 06 40 00 scope boundaries established.
- What sits in architectural woodwork and what sits in an adjacent section is a live question on almost every package, and answering it wrong is how a bid is won at a loss.
- Submittals assembled for a reviewer.
- Indexed, specification-referenced, with deviations declared rather than drawn. The package is a commercial document that happens to contain drawings.
Standards that govern here
AWI and AWS. The Architectural Woodwork Standards govern most commercial and institutional woodwork. Grade is named in the specification and the drawing has to support it.
Quality certification programmes. Where a specification requires a quality programme, the obligations sit with the fabricator and the certifying body. Those obligations carry cost and lead time, and they belong in the estimate.
Fire, seismic and performance requirements where the project imposes them, which changes substrate and assembly selection.
We detail to the standard your project names and report what it requires. We are not a certifying authority and we do not issue compliance certification.
Market requirements
Where packages fail here
- The specification read as description.
- Grade and material obligations treated as background, then found at submittal review.
- Scope boundary assumed.
- Casework partly in equipment sections on healthcare and laboratory work, priced once or not at all.
- Fabrication detail on a submittal.
- Generating comments on decisions the architect never owned, and adding a round nobody budgeted.
- Mixed units.
- Rare, immediately visible, and it costs credibility before the drawing is even read.
Sectors active here
Services that apply
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you work to AWI standards?
We detail to the standard your project specification names, which in most United States commercial work is AWI or AWS. The specification is read in full before drawing, and grade obligations are extracted and reported. We are not a certifying body and we do not issue compliance certification.
Do you work in imperial?
Yes, throughout, on United States work. Units follow the market rather than the producer, and mixed-unit documents are not issued.
Can you establish the Div 06 40 00 scope boundary?
Yes, and it is one of the first things done on a bid package. Included scope, adjacent-section scope and genuinely ambiguous items are reported as three separate categories.
Who reviews the work before it reaches us?
A named senior reviewer in your time zone, after an independent check by someone other than the detailer who produced the set.
Send a package with its specification
What comes back is what the document requires and where it conflicts with the drawings.
- Specification read in full before drawing, grade obligations reported
- Div 06 40 00 scope boundary established before quantities are taken
- Submittals indexed and specification-referenced for the reviewer
- One named contact, not a general queue
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Scope and questions come back, not a template.
