What Are Construction Documents?

Drawings show where and how much: plans, elevations, sections, details, and schedules. The project manual says what products and execution are required, in CSI MasterFormat sections, plus Division 01 general requirements and the general conditions of the contract. A bidder who prices the drawings and skips the specs will miss testing, warranties, and temporary facilities that the drawings never show.

Each discipline seals its own work. Architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, civil, and fire protection sheets are one bid set and several professional responsibilities. The architect usually assembles the volume. Assembly is not authorship of the engineering sheets.

The contract documents typically include the agreement, the general and supplementary conditions, the drawings, the specifications, and the addenda issued before signing. Modifications after signing, such as change orders and construction change directives, join that list. "Construction documents" in an AIA phase list is the production phase. "Contract documents" is the legal set. They overlap and they are not synonyms.

An issued-for-bid set and an issued-for-construction set can differ. Addenda during bidding change the CDs before award. The field set should fold those addenda in, or every foreman becomes an archivist. Issued for construction is a status of the CD set, not a different kind of document.

Owners ask for 30, 60, and 90 percent CD submissions so they can review the set while it is cheap to change. Those packages are progress issues of the construction documents. They are not bid sets, even when a sheet looks finished. Bidding a 60% CD set means bidding allowances where details do not exist yet.

One hundred percent means the team has incorporated the last agreed review and is ready to seal for bid or permit. It does not mean the project will have zero RFIs. It means the known scope was drawn and specified.

Plan reviewers comment, bidders ask questions that become addenda, and the contractor later issues RFIs and submittals against specific sheets and spec sections. A good CD set makes those references easy: sheet numbers, detail marks, and specification sections that exist. A set that cites a section nobody wrote produces the RFI on day one.

Record documents at closeout show the as-built condition. They start from the CDs and absorb the changes. Teams that never kept the CD revision history cannot reconstruct what was bid versus what was built.