A flooring bid built from the finish schedule alone is a bid missing its most expensive line item. The schedule tells you the product, the base type, the transitions. What it doesn't tell you — because it's almost never stated in the flooring section at all — is what happens when the substrate underneath doesn't meet the product manufacturer's moisture or flatness requirements, and who pays when it doesn't.
This is a working list of where flooring scope actually gets decided, built from what shows up across real Canadian ICI tenders. Not a product catalogue — a list of the specific clauses worth hunting down before the number leaves the office.
What's reliably yours
- Finish flooring supply and installation — resilient (LVT/VCT/sheet), carpet and carpet tile, wood, laminate, rubber: every product named in the finish schedule with its specified system.
- Wall base, transitions and accessories — base type and height per schedule, transition strips, stair nosings, edge trims. Counted in linear feet; the item most often under-quantified by thinking in square feet only.
- Adhesives and installation systems per manufacturer — the specified adhesive, moisture-rated system, or seam-welding method. The named system decides the labour, not just the material cost.
- Minor substrate preparation — feather patching and minor skim coating within the manufacturer's stated tolerances. Minor is the operative word — see below for where it stops being yours.
Where the fight actually happens
Moisture testing: the threshold and who pays
This is the single most disputed item in flooring, and it's disputed for a structural reason: the moisture testing requirement — MVER or RH limits per product, the number of test locations, the pass/fail threshold — is often stated only in Division 03 or in a narrow Division 09 05 61 section most estimators don't specifically hunt for. Two separate questions need separate answers: who pays for the testing itself, and who pays for mitigation when a test fails. They're not always the same trade, and the tender needs to say both, not just one.
Moisture mitigation and self-levelling underlayment
When a moisture test fails, an epoxy moisture barrier or a mitigating underlayment is a genuinely large cost — and it belongs to whoever the documents assign it to, which is not automatically the flooring trade just because flooring is what sits on top of it. The same logic applies to self-levelling underlayment beyond minor feather patching: in scope only when the documents explicitly put it there, otherwise it's substrate correction that belongs to someone else entirely.
The curing compound clause hiding in the concrete section
A note reading "no curing compounds under flooring," or a requirement to remove curing compound before installation, is written in the concrete section — priced by the flooring bid only when someone thinks to look for it there, because nobody else claims it. It's a small clause with a real cost attached (mechanical or chemical removal across the whole slab area), and it's exactly the kind of requirement that a section-by-section read skips past.
Floor flatness: install versus grind-then-install
FF numbers or a gap-under-straightedge spec attached to a flooring product is the difference between a straightforward install and a grind-and-prep operation before installation can start at all. This is a case where the flooring section's own product requirement — not a concrete or Division 01 clause — is the one that changes the labour, so it's worth reading the finish schedule specifically for tolerance language, not just product names.
The other half: what isn't yours, even when it looks close
- Substrate construction and correction — the slab itself, its flatness, its cracks, its curing compounds, is the concrete trade's. Flooring prices what sits on top of it, not what's wrong with it — beyond the minor prep already covered above.
- Ceramic and stone tile — usually its own trade under Division 09 30, worth flagging as a note when a tender lumps it into the same section as resilient and carpet, since the pricing and labour models don't transfer.
Four things that hide outside the finish schedule
- Acclimatization and site conditions. Product needing to sit on site for a stated number of days before installation, plus temperature and humidity windows during and after — both a schedule cost and a temporary-climate cost, and both usually written into Division 01 rather than the flooring section.
- Attic stock and extra material. An overage percentage per product is a real supply cost, and it's stated one line deep inside each individual 09 6x section rather than gathered anywhere obvious.
- Specialty floors. Terrazzo, fluid-applied/resinous systems, sports floors and access flooring each carry their own installation system and often their own subcontractor — confirm which the tender actually assigns to your scope rather than assuming a specialty floor mentioned once is automatically excluded.
- Sequence around finished flooring. Whether base goes before or after paint, and how finished floors get protected during ceiling and wall work happening around them, is a scheduling question with real protection-material cost attached.
Who you're actually sharing the floor with
| Trade | What to reconcile before you price |
|---|---|
| Concrete | Moisture, flatness and curing compounds — three separate boundary disputes, each needing the documents' assignment extracted verbatim, not assumed. |
| Painting | Sequence: base before or after paint, and protection of finished floors during adjacent wall and ceiling work. |
| Millwork & casework | Flooring under versus to casework — the layout drawings, not the finish schedule, decide the actual square footage. |
| General contractor | Conditioned space for acclimatization and the installation window — who provides climate control, and when finished floors need protecting. |
The pass that catches most of this
Read the finish schedule for the product, then read Division 03 and Division 01 specifically for moisture, flatness and curing-compound language before pricing a single square foot. The finish schedule tells you what to install; the boundary clauses scattered outside it tell you what that installation is actually going to cost once the substrate underneath doesn't cooperate — which, on enough tenders to matter, it doesn't.