Types of Submittals

So, another important part of evaluating contract documents vs. the working place is going through the submittals. As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of different submittal types. The first one's probably test data which is general compliance for each material based off of say, ASTM standards or a specific trade organization standards. This is making sure that the material itself is strong enough, a lot of times durable enough, has appropriate factors say for slip coefficients, has appropriate noise reduction coefficients, there's kind of a myriad of different things depending on the product.

The second part of that is product data. This is the data sheet provided by the manufacturer. This is a big list of what the product is, what are the standards it conforms to, what size is this, what specific sort of product dimensions are we using, thicknesses, things like that and you compare this back to your details, say, yes, we are using 3'8 cinch tile for example, say, in the mall, this is the appropriate tile, this is the color that we want, this is the submittal after that, this is the sample submittal, so you actually receive a piece of the product.

You're checking it for color, clarity, consistency throughout the whole project, I mean you can see the number of different types of samples you'll get, you'll end up with a desk and a box full of these. But the important thing is making sure that they match your specifications and your design intent. The next level is a mock-up submittal.

This is where you actually start to get a sense of what the work will actually look like when it's installed. Sometimes you have multiple products. In this case, you have glass, silicone, which would be a different product data, you have a stainless steel trimming piece that would again be a different product data. But you're looking at the assembly. This is where you kind of get your first chance to evaluate quality. You need to make sure that any sort of quality expectations you have that this is not meeting, that you make them clear and make sure that it's understood that going forward say for instance, that this is not quite as dirty or this is the wrong color, that you need to make sure that that is clear.

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