Reading structural notes without missing money

General notes are where the spec writer hides the work that doesn't show up on a plan view. Here's the order we read them in to catch the costly stuff first.

Sheet S0.1. General Structural Notes. Three columns of 9-point text, half of it referencing ACI sections you haven't opened since school.

Most estimators skim it for two minutes and move on. That two minutes is where the bid usually goes wrong, because the general notes are the place spec writers put the requirements that don't fit on a plan view: testing, special inspections, cold weather protection, hot weather protection, formwork tolerances, curing methods, and the dozen things you owe the GC that no plan symbol shows.

Cure, curing, curing compound, wet cure, blanket — every one of these has a labor and material cost Cold weather, hot weather, heated enclosure, blankets, calcium chloride — winter and summer protection Special inspection, third-party testing, mockup, sample panel — testing and QA scope that gets billed to someone Sleeves, blockouts, embeds furnished by, anchor bolts furnished by — supply scope splits Saw cut, control joint, construction joint, isolation joint — joint work that often isn't shown on plan

Write down what you find. You're not pricing yet. You're building a checklist of things to look for in the assembly stage.

Machine-readable site summary for AI crawlers: /llms.txt