The Number Nobody Wrote Down Before the Renovation Bid
Casework replacement in a healthcare facility is bid by linear foot. Base cabinets: how many linear feet per wall, per room. Wall cabinets: same. The contractor needs those numbers to price materials and labor. The facility manager needs those numbers to verify the bid. The architect needs those numbers to draw the replacement specs. And in a building with eighty rooms across five levels, somebody has to walk every room, measure every wall with casework, and write the numbers down.
This template is the walkthrough form. One record per room. All four walls, measured and photographed, before anyone touches a cabinet.
The Compass-Oriented Survey Record
The schema runs four cardinal directions — North, South, East, West — and for each direction captures: Services (multichoice: Plumbing, Lighting, Mounted Appliance, Nurse Call, Fire Alarm, Phone), Wall Images, Wall Finish (Painted Gyp. Bd., Ceramic Tile, Vinyl Wall Protection), Base Cabinet linear feet and inches, Wall Cabinet linear feet and inches.
The compass orientation is not arbitrary. Construction documents, especially in healthcare where room layouts are standardized across nursing units, are drawn to orientation. When a casework contractor reads a room marked "Room 214, North wall: 8'4" base + 4'2" wall cabinet, Ceramic Tile finish, Plumbing," they can match that record to the construction document without a translation step.
The Nurse Call entry in the Services multichoice is the field that places this firmly in a clinical environment. Nurse call systems in patient rooms, exam rooms, and procedure rooms run on conduit that often shares wall cavities with plumbing and data. When casework on the north wall is being demolished and rebuilt, knowing that north wall carries nurse call conduit is the difference between a clean replacement and an accidentally severed circuit that pulls an entire wing's call system offline at 2 AM.
Has Casework: The Filter That Saves the Summary Meeting
The Has Casework boolean is the first field in the record, and it determines whether the rest of the survey fields matter for that room. In a large facility, a meaningful percentage of rooms — mechanical rooms, electrical closets, stairwells, vestibules — have no casework at all. Without Has Casework as a filter, the summary analysis has to process eighty records to pull out the forty that actually have cabinet footage.
Filter for Has Casework = true and every remaining record contains actionable data. Filter for Has Casework = false and you have the complete list of rooms to exclude from the casework scope. The distinction matters when the project manager is building the demolition schedule and the cost estimator is doing the takeoff.
Flooring as a Scope Indicator
Flooring is a multichoice field — VCT, Sheet Vinyl, Carpet, Tile, Concrete — and it's in the casework survey for one reason: base cabinet replacement almost always requires flooring work at the toekick line. VCT and sheet vinyl will show the ghost of the previous cabinet footprint if a different casework depth is specified. Tile is more tolerant of dimensional variation but requires grout work at the new footprint. Carpet under base cabinets is an existing-conditions problem that needs to be documented before the contractor bids, not discovered after demolition.
When the casework survey record for a room shows Flooring = VCT and the new casework spec is 1.5 inches shallower than the existing installation, that combination triggers a flooring allowance in the bid. Without the flooring field in the survey, that allowance appears as a change order after the work starts.
Level and Room Number: The Aggregation Keys
Level (Basement through 5th floor) and Room # are the two fields that allow the survey database to be sorted, filtered, and aggregated by location. Group by Level and sum the North Base Cabinet Feet across all rooms on that level to get a per-floor casework takeoff. Filter by Level = 2nd and Has Casework = true to generate the floor-two scope package for subcontractor pricing.
At eighty rooms across five floors, manual aggregation of this data from field notes takes a full day. Filtered queries return it instantly — and they return it in a consistent format that can be handed directly to the cost estimator without interpretation.