Everybody gets three bids. It is the one piece of renovation advice that has fully penetrated, repeated by every contractor, every relative and every article ever written about hiring a builder.
Nobody tells you what to do with them once they arrive.
Three Bids, Three Different Jobs
Here is the thing the advice skips. The three documents on your kitchen table are not three prices for one job. They are three different jobs, each priced accurately by the person who scoped it.
One includes demolition and haul-away. One assumes you are handling that. One mentions it in a line you will read as included and the contractor intends as excluded. One has priced permits, one has written “permits by owner,” and one has not mentioned permits at all because the person who wrote it does them routinely and did not think to say so.
Then there are the allowances, which are where this gets genuinely slippery. Two bids both say “tile.” One of them has a number behind that word that assumes a basic ceramic. The other assumes something nicer because the contractor was standing in your kitchen and formed an impression of your taste. You will discover which is which at the tile shop, months later, when your selection costs a multiple of the allowance and the difference lands on you.
So you look at the three totals, and the lowest one wins, and the lowest one won because it included the least. That is not a cheap contractor. That is a narrower scope.
The Comparison Has to Happen Line by Line
The only way to compare bids honestly is to break them into the same lines and set them next to each other. Cabinets against cabinets. Electrical against electrical. Labor, permits, demolition, finishes, each in its own row, each bid in its own column.
What you are looking for is not the smallest number in each row. It is the empty cells.
An empty cell means one contractor priced something the others did not. That is the single most useful piece of information in the whole exercise, and it is invisible in a stack of PDFs. Either the two who left it out know something the third does not, or the third is the only one being complete. Both are worth a phone call, and the phone call is short because you can name the exact line.
This is tedious to do by hand, which is why almost nobody does it. It involves retyping three documents into a grid, in different formats, with line items that do not use the same words for the same work. There is a decent walkthrough of the method if you want to try it on paper first, including a worked kitchen example where one of three bids turns out to be missing four of seven cost lines.
Where the Tool Comes In
Cobblewood exists to make that grid the default rather than a chore you skip.
You set up your budget as line items first, which is a useful discipline on its own. Then you enter each contractor’s bid against those same lines, up to five of them. The bid view places them side by side, and it has a setting that does the thing you actually want: show only the gaps. Hide everything the bids agree on and leave the rows where somebody has nothing.
That view is the whole argument. It takes a pile of incomparable documents and reduces them to a short list of questions to ask before you sign anything.
Be clear about what it is not doing. Cobblewood does not rate contractors, does not recommend one bid over another, does not match you with anyone and does not vouch for any of them. It has no opinion about who should get the job. It lines up the numbers you typed in and shows you where they disagree. The judgment stays yours, which is appropriate, because you are the one who has met these people.
Ask the Boring Question Early
The conversation this sets up is unglamorous and it is the one that saves the project.
You call the contractor whose bid is missing a line and you ask, plainly, whether that work is included. Sometimes the answer is yes and it was folded into another line. Sometimes the answer is no and they assumed you knew. Sometimes there is a pause, and the pause is the most valuable thing you will get all week.
Do that five or six times across the gaps and you end up with three bids that are finally describing the same job. Only then does the bottom number mean anything.
Three bids is good advice. It is just the first half of the instruction, and somebody forgot to write down the second half.
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