A doors and hardware bid rarely goes wrong on the door count. Hollow metal frames, wood doors and hardware sets all sit on a schedule, and counting openings is the easy part of the job. Where this trade actually loses money is at the edges the schedule doesn't settle by itself: whether supply comes with installation attached, who wires an electrified strike once the door supplier has finished prepping it, and whether the hardware schedule that looks complete actually covers every opening on the drawings.
This is a working list of where doors and hardware scope actually gets decided, built from what shows up across real Canadian ICI tenders — schools, healthcare and institutional work with security and electrified hardware requirements layered onto a standard door package. Not a hardware catalogue. A list of the specific questions worth answering before the number leaves the office.
What's reliably yours
- Hollow metal frames and doors supply — gauges, cores, fire and life-safety labels, profiles, sidelites and borrowed lites, all per the door schedule. This is the most consistently documented part of the bid and the least likely place for a real dispute to originate.
- Wood doors supply — cores, faces, labels, and prefit or premachine requirements per the schedule. Prefit and premachine in particular are worth reading closely, since they shift labour that would otherwise happen in the field into the shop, at a different cost structure than a field-fit door.
- Finish hardware supply — the hardware sets, complete. Extract set counts, which items are electrified, how closers and operators are split between manual and automatic, and any clause restricting hardware to a single named series, since that last one removes your normal ability to substitute for cost or lead time.
- Keying — keying meetings, master-key structure, key quantities, construction cores, and the final cylinder swap at turnover. This is coordination-heavy work with a real administrative cost that's easy to under-price against a simple per-cylinder unit rate.
Where the fight actually happens
Installation labour
Whether this scope is supply-only or supply-and-install is genuinely inconsistent tender to tender, and the two halves don't even move together: frames are commonly installed by drywall or masonry rather than this trade, while hardware installation can land almost anywhere depending on the job. Extract the assignment explicitly for frames and for hardware separately — treating them as a single install decision is exactly how one half of the labour ends up unpriced by everyone.
Electrified hardware
Electric strikes, magnetic locks, automatic flush bolts and their power supplies need to be extracted together with the wiring split, because the split is where the actual argument happens: power and rough-in almost always belong to electrical, but termination — who makes the final connection at the device — gets contested on nearly every job that has electrified hardware at all. Confirm termination explicitly per opening type rather than assuming the same answer holds for every electrified device on the schedule.
Access doors
Access panels are frequently written as "supplied under this section, installed by the trade requiring them" — a split that sounds clean until you notice it depends on correctly identifying every trade that requires one. Extract the exact split as written, and cross-check it against the mechanical and electrical schedules that actually call for the access panels in the first place, since a panel required by a duct detector three sections away rarely gets flagged back to the door schedule automatically.
The other half: what isn't yours, even when it looks close
- Aluminum entrances — storefront and curtain-wall doors belong to the glazing trade, not this one. The nuance worth extracting is hardware supply for those doors specifically, since it's sometimes carved back to this trade even though the door itself isn't.
- Overhead, coiling and specialty doors — a separate specialty-doors trade, including the operators for powered units. Worth flagging when a tender lumps a specialty door into the same schedule as hollow metal and wood, since the pricing and lead-time models don't transfer between them.
- Security electronics — card readers, door contacts and access controllers are Division 28 work, not this trade's. What is yours is the door and frame prep those devices require — extract the prep requirement specifically, since a door ordered without the correct prep is a costly field retrofit later.
Four things that hide outside the hardware schedule entirely
- Hardware schedule completeness. Openings with no assigned set, sets referencing a discontinued product series, and outright conflicts between the schedule and the written spec are all common — and every gap found now is a change order avoided later rather than a change order discovered at rough-in.
- Fire and smoke labels. The label rating assigned to each opening also constrains what glazing is allowed in the door, and that constraint is worth checking against the actual vision-lite sizes shown on the elevations, not just assumed compliant.
- Specialty openings. STC-rated, lead-lined and bullet-resistant openings each come from a different supplier with its own lead time, and a single specialty opening buried in an otherwise standard schedule can end up setting the critical path for the whole door package.
- Delivery, storage and handling. On-site storage duties and the language assigning damage responsibility while doors and frames sit on site awaiting installation are worth extracting explicitly on any job with a long gap between delivery and frame-setting.
Who you're actually sharing the opening with
| Trade | What to reconcile before you price |
|---|---|
| Drywall & masonry | Who sets hollow metal frames in stud or masonry walls, and the grouting requirement for frames in masonry openings. |
| Electrical & security | Power transfer hinges, rough-in locations and termination responsibility, confirmed per opening rather than once for the whole schedule. |
| Painting | Factory-finished versus field-finished hollow metal per the schedule, and the sequence for touch-up after frame installation. |
| General contractor | Keying authority, temporary construction cores during the build, and the turnover process to permanent keying. |
The pass that catches most of this
Read the hardware schedule against the door schedule opening by opening, not as two documents assumed to agree — that's where gaps and discontinued-series conflicts actually surface. Then confirm installation labour and electrified-hardware termination explicitly rather than defaulting to whatever split applied on the last job, since neither one has a consistent default across tenders. The door schedule tells you what to supply; the boundary items above are what decide whether that supply arrives at a job site ready to install or arrives to a fight about who installs it.