Door Schedule Addendum Changes: How to Find What Actually Moved Before You Reprice

The door hardware section came out with Addendum 02. Every one of its 25 pages still carries the March bid date.

An addendum that touches Division 8 rarely arrives as a list of what changed. It arrives as a replacement: a reissued 087100 section, a door schedule sheet printed again in full, a floor plan with a cloud around part of what moved and nothing around the rest. Your job is to work out, opening by opening, how the new set differs from the one you priced, and the documents won’t help much, because they’re built to show the current state of the building rather than the difference. That’s why door schedule addendum changes need their own method, separate from the takeoff.

The City of Santa Fe’s Section 087100 for Fire Station No. 2 shows the problem in a single file. It was posted as an attachment to Addendum 02, in a file dated April 20, 2020, about six weeks after the project manual was issued to bid on March 10. All 25 pages carry the footer “Issued for Bid 03.10.2020” and the word addendum doesn’t appear anywhere in the text. Only the file name says it’s an addendum.

This isn’t unusual, and nobody did anything wrong. It’s what a reissued hardware section often looks like, and nothing on the page tells you whether, or where, it differs from what bidders were holding in March.

An addendum becomes part of the contract the moment you bid it

An addendum changes the documents you’re pricing, and once your bid acknowledges it, you’re held to it whether or not you traced every door it touched.

The American Institute of Architects defines the term in AIA A701, the standard Instructions to Bidders: “Addenda are written or graphic instruments issued by the Architect, which, by additions, deletions, clarifications, or corrections, modify or interpret the Bidding Documents.” The same document requires each bidder to confirm they’ve received every addendum issued and to acknowledge them in the bid, and it lists all addenda among the documents that make up the proposed contract. AIA A201, the general conditions, carries that through: addenda issued before the contract is signed are contract documents.

The engineers’ documents are blunter about price. The commentary on the 2018 EJCDC construction documents, published by the Engineers Joint Contract Documents Committee, whose sponsors are NSPE, ACEC and ASCE, notes that “Addenda are critical elements in the bidding process and often affect bid pricing.” It adds that addenda landing later in the bidding period are more likely to cause problems for bidders and the subs bidding to them.

Put those together and the risk is easy to see. The acknowledgment box on the bid form takes ten seconds to fill in. It commits you to every change in the addendum, including the ones nobody clouded, and the commitment doesn’t care whether you found them.

So the real question is where those changes hide.

Division 8 addenda usually arrive as replacements, not as lists of changes

Drawings carry clouds, but a reissued spec section or a reprinted schedule often carries nothing, so the change you need has to be found by comparing old against new.

On the drawing side there’s a convention. The US National CAD Standard marks a revision on a sheet with a revision cloud and a delta symbol, and its own FAQ acknowledges that practice on addenda varies: “some clients may only require addendum changes to be identified and the issue block to be updated (without any changes to the sheet identification).” Clouds are placed by hand, so they’re only as complete as someone’s record of what was touched.

Specification sections rarely get clouds. When one changes at an addendum, it’s often replaced outright. Santa Fe’s 087100 is a clean example of that: the section that came out with Addendum 02 carries 40 hardware set headers and 233 line items, and nothing on any of its pages flags which of them differ from what bidders had before. We walked through how the Santa Fe fire station specification assigns its doors in an earlier piece, and an addendum can move any one of those assignments without leaving a mark on the page.

The door schedule sits between the two. It’s a drawing, so it may get clouds, but it’s usually generated from a model or a spreadsheet, so a reissued schedule sheet is often a full reprint where the changed rows look exactly like the unchanged ones. Brian Coulombe, writing in Locksmith Ledger about how door hardware gets coordinated, describes schedules being developed and reviewed “separately and in parallel, which ensures some changes are lost or superseded by others.” An addendum is where those lost changes surface.

If the documents won’t point at the changes, you need to know where the expensive ones live.

The changes that move a hardware price hide in four places

Almost every addendum change that moves a Division 8 number shows up in one of four spots: the schedule row, the hardware set itself, the tags on the plans, and the list of openings.

The schedule row. A door’s size, material, rating, frame type or hardware set number changes, and the row is otherwise identical. Lori Greene put it simply on her iDigHardware blog: “I can’t count how many times I’ve reviewed a submittal and found that a single door had been changed to a pair or vice versa.” A single that becomes a pair brings more than a second leaf. Depending on the set, it can bring in an astragal, flush bolts or a coordinator, and a second closer, all under a door number you’ve already priced.

The hardware set. This one’s easy to miss because no door row changes at all. If an addendum edits a set’s contents (a different closer, an added electrified hinge, a lock function swapped), every opening assigned to that set reprices at once. One edited line in 087100 can move dozens of doors.

The tags on the plans and details. Door tags live in more places than the schedule: floor plans, enlarged plans, partition details. An addendum that renumbers or relocates openings has to reach all of them, and it often doesn’t. More on that below.

The opening list. Doors get added and deleted. A deleted door is easy to see if you’re comparing schedules. An added one is easy to see too, unless it was added to the plan and not yet to the schedule, which is exactly the kind of disagreement Division 8 estimators reconcile on the original set and have to reconcile again on every addendum.

Knowing where to look still leaves the bookkeeping.

Track an addendum by opening, not by sheet

Keep a change log keyed to the door, not to the drawing, so every change lands against the opening it reprices.

Sheet-by-sheet review feels thorough and isn’t. You end up with notes that say a sheet was revised but not which doors it touched, and the hardware set edits never show up on a sheet at all. The fix is to anchor everything to the opening.

Owners who care about hardware already think this way. Dartmouth College’s construction guidelines for Section 08 71 00 require the hardware schedule to include a “Door Index; include door number, heading number, and Architects hardware set number.” Those three keys, door number, heading, and the architect’s set, are the right spine for an addendum log too. The same section asks for the schedule in the Door and Hardware Institute’s sequence and format, which groups openings with identical hardware under headings tied back to the architect’s set, so a change to the set shows up against every opening it covers.

A workable log has one row per affected opening and a handful of columns: the door number, the addendum number, what changed (size, rating, set, frame, function, added, deleted), the old value, the new value, and whether it moves the price. What you end up with is a list of differences you can price, defend, and hand to whoever runs the job after award.

Build it in a fixed order. Compare the schedule first, row against row. Then read every hardware set the addendum reissued, against the version you priced, line by line. Then go to the plans and enlarged details for anything the first two passes didn’t explain. Each pass catches what the one before it can’t see.

One kind of change defeats this log if you aren’t watching for it.

Renumbered doors break a takeoff without throwing an error

When openings are renumbered, a comparison by door number reports deletions and additions that are really the same doors, and the real changes get buried in the noise.

In an r/estimators thread comparing Division 8 and Division 10 takeoffs, one estimator described a client renumbering every opening, and the architect not carrying the new room designations and door tags onto all of the enlarged details. Those details were the only place to find the partition detail tag the estimator needed. The same failure hits a door takeoff. A schedule comparison can come back clean because the schedule itself was updated, while the old tags sit on a sheet that comparison never touches.

Renumbering is the extreme case of a broader problem. Door numbers are the key everything else hangs on, so when the key changes, matching by number stops working. Match by location instead: room, wall, and swing. The same instinct covers how duplicate tags and match lines throw off door counts, since a tag that shows up twice and a tag that changed halfway through an addendum fail the same way.

Done by hand, all of this takes time you may not have.

A takeoff you can re-run beats one you patch by hand

If the takeoff can be rebuilt on the new set and compared against the old one, the comparison is between two complete takeoffs, not between your markups and a PDF you skimmed the afternoon before bid.

Patching works like this: you open the addendum, find the clouds, adjust the affected lines, and trust that the clouds were complete. Every miss in the clouding becomes a miss in the bid.

Overlay tools help on drawing sheets (Bluebeam’s overlay among them), but on a schedule they get noisy fast, because one inserted row shifts everything beneath it and the whole lower half of the sheet can light up. An overlay also can’t tell you what a changed hardware set costs.

Re-running inverts that. You treat the addendum set as a fresh set, take it off again, and compare the results opening by opening against what you priced. Changes the architect forgot to cloud show up anyway, because the comparison doesn’t rely on the clouds. That’s the practical case for keeping your door takeoff in software that reads the schedule, the hardware sets and the plans together, rather than in a marked-up PDF and a spreadsheet that has to be edited by hand every time a new set lands.

Either way, the number you send has to say which documents it’s built on.

Name the addendum you priced, in writing

Your bid qualifications should state the specification section, the drawing sheets, and the addendum number your price is based on, so the number is defensible after the documents keep moving.

The qualifications chapter of the Division 8 Estimator’s Guide makes the point directly: name the specification section, the drawing sheet and the addendum number you priced, because “per the hardware schedule” without a revision date isn’t defensible three months later. That’s even more true when an addendum lands two days before bid and you priced the changed openings and qualified the rest.

The acknowledgment on the bid form matters on its own, separate from what you priced. On federal work, FAR 52.214-3 requires bidders to acknowledge every amendment, for example by listing its number and date in the space provided on the bid form, and the acknowledgment has to arrive by the bid deadline. The Government Accountability Office has held that a bidder’s “failure to acknowledge a material amendment to an IFB renders the bid nonresponsive” under federal procurement rules. Private owners and GCs set their own rules, but AIA A701 asks for the same acknowledgment, and a GC leveling sub bids will usually ask which addenda you included.

Write it down, and write it down per addendum.

Four checks belong between an addendum and a revised price

Run these in order, every time, before a revised number goes out.

Keep the set you priced, and compare the new schedule against it row by row. Match on door number, heading and hardware set, and flag every row where any of the three moved, because a row that looks the same at a glance can carry a new set number in its last column. If doors were renumbered, match on room and location. Note both numbers.

Read every hardware set the addendum reissued, including the ones you don’t expect to matter. No schedule row will tell you a set changed. If the whole 087100 section was replaced, read the whole thing against the old one, set by set and line by line, before you trust any count you carried over from the first bid.

Walk the plans and enlarged details for tags that didn’t move with the schedule. Added openings, relocated doors and renumbered tags that missed a sheet all live here. Anything you find that disagrees with the new schedule is an RFI or a qualification, not a guess.

Write the addendum number into the qualifications and the log. Name the spec section, the sheets and the addenda your price includes, acknowledge each one on the bid form, and keep the opening-by-opening change log with the bid file so the project team inherits it after award.

When this doesn’t apply

If the addendum touches only other divisions, you don’t need any of this beyond confirming that, by reading the addendum’s own index and opening any Division 8 sheet or section it lists. If you’re pricing a small tenant improvement with a dozen openings, comparing two schedules by eye takes a few minutes and a formal log is overhead.

Some architects issue addenda as narrative lists that name every changed door. When you get one, use it as a starting point rather than the answer, and still read the reissued sets, since a list written by hand has the same blind spots as a cloud drawn by hand. If the addendum arrives hours before bid close, triage: price the openings you can confirm changed, qualify the rest by addendum number, and finish the comparison after the bid goes in, before anyone signs anything.

Key takeaways

• An addendum issued before the contract is signed becomes part of the contract documents, and acknowledging it on the bid form commits you to every change it contains, whether or not those changes were clouded.
• Division 8 addenda usually arrive as replaced sections and reprinted schedules rather than lists of changes, as Santa Fe’s Addendum 02 hardware section shows, with the original March Issued for Bid footer on all 25 pages.
• The changes that move a hardware price sit in four places: the schedule row, the contents of the hardware set, the door tags on plans and details, and the list of openings.
• An addendum change log keyed to door number, heading and hardware set catches changes that sheet-by-sheet review misses, and renumbered doors have to be matched by location rather than by number.
• Bid qualifications should name the specification section, drawing sheets and addendum number priced, because a price without a revision reference can’t be defended once the documents change again.

Frequently asked questions

Re-run it, don’t patch it. Fresco’s door takeoff software reads the schedule, the plans and the 087100 specification against each other and flags where they don’t line up, so a new set gets the same full read as the one you priced first.