title: "Your plans are not the agreement" h1: "The bid is the agreement, not the plans" description: "You had drawings made and sent them to three contractors, so everyone had the same information. The bid is still the agreement, not the plans, and anything a bid does not name is not in the price."
You had drawings made. You sent them to three contractors. Everyone had the same information.
So when something turns out not to be in the price, it feels like it should not count. It was on the plans. Everybody saw it.
It still may not be in the price, and understanding why is worth more than arguing about it later.
What a set of plans actually is
Drawings describe what you want built.
They do not describe how much of it any particular contractor intends to do, in what sequence, with whose material, to what standard of finish, or at what price. Those are the contractor's decisions, and they are the ones that produce a number.
A set of plans is an input. The bid is the offer. When you accept the offer, the offer is what you agreed to.
That is the whole mechanism, and almost every dispute about scope is really a disagreement about which document is the agreement.
Why identical drawings produce different jobs
Every bid is what the contractor read plus what he assumed.
The assumptions are not laziness. Drawings are quiet on a great deal, and they have to be. A plan can show a wall without saying who patches the ceiling where the wall used to be. It can specify a fixture without saying who buys it. It can show a finished room without naming the number of coats.
Then there are the ordinary conflicts in any set. A note that says one thing and a detail that shows another. A dimension that does not match the scale. A specification that says a product "or equal", which leaves the equal to somebody's judgment.
Three contractors resolve those silences three different ways, each entirely reasonably, and each produces a real and different number. None of them are wrong. They are answering questions the drawings left open.
"Per plans" does not pin anything down
A residential bid does not name the plan set. It says the work is per the plans, and it identifies the job by the address.
That is normal. Revision numbers and dated sheet sets are a commercial habit, and asking a residential contractor which revision he priced would tell him you are running a different kind of job than the one he is standing in.
But look at what that sentence actually does. It points at a document instead of describing the work. And the plans are whatever the plans are now.
So when the drawings change after he has priced them, nothing in the bid records that it happened. There is no revision to compare and no date to point at. The proposal reads exactly as it did before, and it is now attached to a different job.
That is the real reason a bid has to name the work itself. A proposal that describes what is being built survives a change to the drawings, because you can still see what it did and did not include. A proposal that says "per plans" does not.
And if the plans did change after he priced them, that is a new conversation. It needs a new number, in writing, before the work happens. Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because he priced one job and you are now asking for another.
The walkthrough is not a document
A contractor can tell you something standing in your kitchen and mean it completely.
Six weeks later, two people remember that conversation differently. Not because either is dishonest. Because it was a conversation, and it happened while somebody was also thinking about parking, the dog, and how to get a tub up the stairs.
Only one version of the job is on paper. That is the version that gets built and billed, and it is the version an outside reader would land on if it ever came to that.
This is the actual reason things go in writing. Not suspicion. Memory.
Why the contractor is not obliged to absorb it
When the gap turns up mid job, the natural feeling is that he should have caught it.
He will point at his own bid, and he will usually be right to. He priced what he wrote down. You accepted it. Nobody absorbs a large omission out of goodwill, and no contractor is under any obligation to.
It is worth sitting with how reasonable that is from his side. He quoted a job, won it at that number, and scheduled his crew around it. Being asked to add work for nothing is being asked to pay for a misunderstanding he did not create either.
Treating this as a character question makes it worse. It is a documents question, and it has a documents answer.
What changes the moment you accept
Before you accept, asking costs you nothing.
The contractor wants the job. Clarifying scope is a normal part of winning work, and adding a line to a proposal takes a minute. You can ask what is included, what is not, and what a missing item would cost, and none of it is awkward.
After you accept, every one of those questions becomes a negotiation with a crew already scheduled and, often, material already ordered. The question stops being what is included and becomes who is paying for it.
The plans describe the job you wanted. The bid describes the job you bought. Make them the same document before you sign, because afterwards only one of them is the agreement.
What to do with this
Read the bid against the drawings before accepting, item by item, and treat anything the bid does not name as not included until somebody says otherwise in writing.
If the drawings change after a bid is priced, treat it as a new number rather than an update.
When something is agreed after signing, get it added in writing, with a price, before the work happens.
The mechanics of reading three bids against each other are covered in how to compare contractor bids, and what a proposal should have contained in the first place is what should a contractor bid include.