The house

Rooms are tabs and so are the six things that are not rooms, and a tab does not change shape when the build ends. The drawing of a room is not decoration — it is what the decisions settled in it look like, and an undecided room renders undecided with no extra styling at all.

1 · The binder
Rooms first, as drawings, then the six tabs that are not rooms — in the pinned order, with their full names. No short forms: a tile that shortens a name the screen spells out is how one binder becomes two menus.
A caption appears only when the count tells you something

Never one just because the card has a slot for it. Guest bath keeps nothing in here yet mid-build because there the count means something — eight of its neighbors have something and it does not. On day one all nine would be empty and the screen says it once, in a subtitle, rather than nine times.

Counts, never fractions

5 settled · 7 open. No bar, no percentage, no 5 of 12. A state word would be a judgment the app is not entitled to make; a count is a fact about what is inside, and the homeowner draws their own conclusion.

Rung 0 · silent
2 · The drawing is the decisions
The same kitchen twice. Above, nothing settled. Below, four finishes settled. Nothing about the room changed — what changed is what has been decided, and no second asset exists.
Nothing settled
Wall
Cabinet
Floor
Counter
Four settled
Sea Salt
SW 6204
Pewter Green
SW 6208
Warm oak
Hallmark
Honed quartz
Rung 0 — the data renders its own state

No empty-state component was selected for the drawing above. It is gray because the undecided values are tokens and nothing has set one, and it follows the theme for the same reason. That is the best state mechanism in the set, and it is why the ladder has no class for rung 0.

A decided surface is never touched by the theme

Sea Salt and Pewter Green are paint. They are set inline, they win over the defaults, and they look the same in dark as in light — because a color somebody chose does not change when the lights go down.

What is missing is an artifact, not a column

Named regions on the drawing that a settled finish can paint. The photograph half already ships — a zone carries images and a default illustration — and what does not exist is anything associating a drawing's regions with anything. The blocks here are a placeholder for that authoring work.

3 · Three lenses, per session
By room · by material · by who. By when was cut, because time is not a lens — it is what Now is ordered by.
Island electrical is in two sections at once

Tags are overlapping sets, not a partition, so a decision appears under everybody it reaches. Two earlier mockups each invented an exclusive split of the house and invented opposite ones; neither survives, and this is the shape that replaces both.

Per-session, and that is a ruling

The failure it kills: a lens set to by-material three weeks ago, a homeowner who cannot find the kitchen, and a state that is invisible until they notice a chip. A non-default lens is a mode, and the bug is a mode outliving the memory of setting it. A mode you set today survives today — cheaper than remembering, and it removes the problem rather than mitigating it.

And it is a hard dependency on search

If by-material was genuinely how somebody found things and search has not shipped, resetting the lens is strictly worse than remembering it — it takes away the only route they had. Per-session does not ship before search does. If search slips, the lens keeps persisting.

4 · By material
The third lens, and the only one of the three that shows you something no room screen can: the same material in four rooms, decided four times, and not always the same way.
The lens earns its place on one row

Trim, everywhere. By room it is nine identical open items in nine rooms and it looks like nine jobs; here it is one decision with a wide blast radius, which is what it actually is. The same trick works in reverse on the oak: two settled decisions that are individually fine and jointly a mistake, and no room screen can put them next to each other.

Nothing stores this yet, and it is a vocabulary rather than a column

The other two lenses read fields that exist — a zone, and a tag. This one needs somebody to decide that rift oak and quarter-sawn oak are both oak, and that honed limestone belongs with porcelain. That is a taxonomy to author, not a migration to write, which is why this lens has always been the last of the three and why the deck listed it as an artifact rather than a screen.

Rung 2 for a clash, and it is not an error

The two oaks get a say rather than a red mark, and its action puts the two side by side rather than telling anybody which is wrong. Both were settled deliberately; what the product noticed is that they were settled six weeks apart in different rooms, which is exactly the thing a person cannot notice on their own.

5 · Search
Drawn nowhere, and with three lenses over one binder it stops being a convenience: it is how you reach a thing you can name without first deciding which lens it lives under.
Pewter
Colors
Pewter GreenSherwin-Williams SW 6208 · LRV 12 Cabinet
Where it is
KitchenCabinets · settled 2 May
Cabinet packageReed Millwork quote, 14 May · still open
Papers
Kitchen cabinet spec, rev 3Dave Marsh · 12 May
Grouped by what a thing is, not by relevance

A color, the places it appears, and the papers that mention it. A ranked single list would put a PDF above the paint chip on a good day and below it on a bad one, and a homeowner searching for Pewter wants the color and then everywhere it went.

It is the escape hatch the lens depends on

And that is why it is on this page rather than filed under settings. Search is what makes a mode survivable, so the two ship in that order or not at all.

6 · When there is nothing
The state that decides whether somebody searches twice. It has to be able to tell three different nothings apart, and only one of them is about the search.
Three nothings, and this screen is only one of them

Nothing matched is not the same sentence as that is not here, which is 00's not-found and means the thing does not exist, and neither is the same as we do not have this yet, which is the cold cache and resolves itself the moment there is signal. Same empty screen, three different facts, and telling somebody with no signal that their house has no heating is the worst of the three mistakes.

The way out is the coach, because the coach can answer this

A search that finds nothing about radiant floor heating has still learned that somebody wants to know about radiant floor heating. Handing that to the door that answers questions is the only useful move available, and it is better than the alternative every product reaches for, which is suggesting they check their spelling.

Near it is labeled as near, never as results

Silently degrading to fuzzy matches is how a person concludes the product does not understand their house. The two rows are under their own header, the line under them says they are not matches, and neither is dressed as an answer. Showing something rather than nothing is only worth doing when the screen is honest about what the something is.

7 · Decided before you
The binder of a semi-custom house, where the builder settled most of the structure before there was a buyer. Two phones: the tab as it opens, and the section a homeowner has to ask for. It is collapsed by default and it is never a count of what you missed.
Collapsed by default, and the entry point is a card rather than a section

A semi-custom buyer's binder opens on the three things that are theirs, not on the thirty that are not. Drawing what somebody else decided as a section of their house makes their own choices look like a minority of it, which is both discouraging and, on the only axis that matters to them, false: what they can still change is what they will live with. The door card says what is behind it in one line, and it says the thing that makes it safe to ignore: nothing in here needs anything from you.

Two different nothings, and they are not in the same list

The first card is decisions with answers, sourced from the plan set. The second is decisions the house has already answered in concrete and nobody has told us about. Those are opposite states wearing the same gray and merging them would produce the one screen this deck refuses everywhere else: a set of blanks presented as a backlog. The second card's caption says optional, always because it is, and then says why somebody might want to anyway.

Recording is a historical act, and the copy never asks what they want

Every sentence in the second phone is past tense and about the house: built already, I don't know what went in. Q92's 2026-08-23 amendment rules that the answer carries source='stated' and via='stepper', attributed to the authenticated project seat: that project member is selecting the authored description that matches the building, not reporting an inspection or instrument reading, and the resolution never claims they chose it. Asking a spec buyer what they want their foundation to be is the failure this whole mode exists to prevent.

What does not apply is not here, and the callout says so out loud

The four basement decisions are not collapsed, not grayed and not filed under decided before you. They were never created. A decision that does not apply is absent rather than hidden — §7.1, nothing seeds on an unsettled or a closed gate — and the callout exists because absence is invisible by construction and a homeowner who has heard of basement waterproofing deserves to know we did not forget it.

Why "Nobody has told me these" and not "Missing"

Missing is a property of a record; this is a property of our knowledge. The house is not missing a bathroom layout. Same reason 10 frame 6 says these aren't behind: the product is the one that is behind, and a screen that blames the reader for a gap it owns is the tone this deck spends most of its rules avoiding.

8 · The house, with the room beside it
Two columns, because this screen has a subject: the room being decided. It sits at 440 and the river stays 720. Below 1496 the same page stacks the room above the river rather than squeezing either.
The house
The Hollis House
The kitchen
The Hollis House

Started March 2026 · 9 spaces · 47 decisions

By room By material By who
Kitchen
5 settled · 7 open
Primary bath
3 settled · 4 open
Mudroom
2 settled · 3 open
Great room
6 settled · 2 open
Laundry
4 settled · 1 open
Guest bath
Nothing in here yet
And everything else
MoneyA budget, 3 quotes
Papers & permits14 files
People6 contacts
Care3 coming up
Plans & drawings9 sheets
The build so farFive phases
Choosing this fixes the cabinet order · Marcus needs it Friday Settle the kitchen

Why a tab keeps its shape

The same four sections in the same order, mid-build and after move-in, with different things inside them. That repetition is the whole point rather than a copy-paste shortcut: it is what makes the binder outlives the build structural rather than a marketing line, and it is what the paid tier is bought for. At renewal the app is not a build tool somebody has finished with — it is the same three doors doing a different job.

What is not settled

The material vocabulary behind the by-material lens. It blocks on a taxonomy that does not exist and a color field type that is not one of the seven the product has. It is authoring work and it belongs with the lens rather than with a screen.

Whether the build so far is a nav tile or only a row here. Mockup 21 draws six binder rows and pays for it with a page in level two, and flags this as reasonable to overrule. This deck does not overrule it.

What the drawings are honest about

A settled decision cannot produce a color today: there is no color spec-field type, and roughly 65 color-shaped field keys store free text that nothing parses into a hex. A hand-typed color never gets a surface either — the surface vocabulary exists only inside an extractor's JSON schema, and counter and backsplash are not in it, which are the two largest surfaces in the room drawn above.