Concrete Takeoff Techniques for Foundation Plans Using Bluebeam Revu and Structural Notes Analysis

All right, so now we're going to go ahead and take a look at the structural portions of the home, specifically the foundation. So looking here at the foundation plan on sheet S2, we can see that we do have what appears to be a continuous concrete footing, as well as a couple of these pier or pad footings with what looks to be framing, structural framing that gets set on top of it. Right now we are really just going to focus on the concrete portions of this, and since we don't necessarily see any sort of legend telling us much information about these takeoffs here, let's go ahead down the notes and the notes will probably tell us everything we need to know.

So briefly taking a look at some of these notes here, skimming down, let's jump to note 8 here, and note 8 tells us that all new continuous exterior perimeter and continuous interior bearing wall footings shall be as follows. So what this one looks to be is an interior bearing wall footing, as we can see that there is some sort of wall on top of it. Actually could be interior, could be exterior, but either way it's going to follow the same information.

So the note is telling us that all of these footings should be 15 inches wide and 18 inches deep. So I just went and hit the H key and got my highlighter out, so I remember those dimensions when we go ahead and do these takeoffs. And the rest of the note also says here it will be put into the native soil or into 90% compacted fill with some reinforcing bars from the top and the bottom of the footing.

Okay great, so we're not necessarily going to get as detailed as all of the individual bars or anything, but let's just go ahead and do a concrete takeoff here. And the other thing to note is up on note 7 here, this concrete shall have a minimum compressive strength of 2500 psi. That's really important to know when we're doing this takeoff, and just so we can note that on our counts.

So going up to this particular area to do this takeoff, I'm not seeing any sort of scale set on this plan. If we scroll down to the bottom right corner, not seeing any sort of scale here. But there were some dimensions called out in this foundation notes number eight, and that's going to help us out here.

So within Bluebeam, even if you don't have a scale specifically set on a plan, you can use the calibration function to take a known dimension and draw it on the plans to actually calibrate what the scale should be based on that known dimension. So what we're going to do here is go into our tools drop down, we're going to go into measure, and we are going to hit set scale. When we set the scale, we are just going to click calibrate.

When we hit calibrate, it tells us to select two points of a known dimension to calibrate this measurement tool. Okay, since that note said that our footings are going to be 15 inches wide, we are simply going to grab one side of the footing, bring this to another side of the footing, and we are going to type in over here that it is one foot and three inches. One foot and three inches, and we're going to apply that scale.

When we applied that scale, what you are going to be able to see is over on the left hand side in our thumbnails, if we navigate to our thumbnails, we will be able to see the scale that was just established based on the known dimension that we just measured. What we can do is just do a quick double check as well of the length here. Let's just grab a length takeoff and run it all the way over, and we can see right there that it does say one foot three inches or 15 inches.

So again, we will go back to properties here, click on our test takeoff, and we can see that it does say one foot three inches or 15 inches. So what we're going to do now is we are going to do a takeoff of this footing. So to double check our dimensions, 15 inches wide and 18 inches deep.

Okay, since we're doing concrete, we are going to need a volume. We're going to look for a cubic yardage here. So to do this, let's go ahead and grab a volume takeoff up at the top here.

And how we're going to do this is first, we're going to go ahead and write some description in. We are going to call this our continuous concrete footing. We also know from note seven that this is going to be a minimum of 2,500 psi, so we'll just call it 2,500 psi.

Color, let's just go ahead and put a dark blue to this, dark blue. And then specification section, we are going to make sure we want to put in 03-3100 structural concrete. We don't necessarily have to make a tool as we're not going to use this a ton, but let's just set it as the default.

And how we are going to do this footing takeoff is we're going to have the volume selected, and we are just going to do the whole outside perimeter of this footing. We're going to go to each corner, and we're going to click on each corner, and we're going to bring it back. We have some fill in here, so let's actually take that fill out.

All right, so we have the outside perimeter of the footing. What we're going to go ahead now and do is use our polygon cutout tool. We're going to grab our polygon cutout, and we're going to go from the inside perimeter of the footing, and we're going to hit each of these corners here.

And that way we are going to trim, basically, instead of taking off this whole area, we are trimming it down to just the actual area of the footing. And since we've calculated this, but we haven't put any additional dimension to it, we can still see that it's at a zero cubic feet. We're going to click on this takeoff.

We're going to go up to our properties bar. We're going to hit this units drop down, and in this units drop down is where we're going to put in the depth. And the depth was going to be 18 inches per our note below, so that's going to be one foot and six inches.

And the volume that we're looking for, we're going to be looking for cubic yards here. We can change this to cubic yards, because that is what concrete typically arrives in. And we can see that once we've done that, our cubic yards measurement is going to show up here on our takeoff.

If we want to double check, we just go over to our totals, we hit drop down here, and we can see that our depth is correct. Our width is going to be 15 inches at a single segment, but since we ringed this entire perimeter, that is going to be the total width of the whole footing, not just the width of one section. But that right there is how we get a cubic yardage takeoff for a concrete footing.

And next up, let's go ahead and take a look at some of these pad footings as well. We can see that we have a C, another C, and then a D and a B. So let's go ahead back down to our notes and see if there's any specific information about those particular footing types. And when we get down here to our pad footing schedule, let me get my tool out of the way to give us some more real estate to work with.

We said that we have, sorry, we have C, C, D, and B. So let's go ahead and just highlight these here. We've got C, C, D, and B. So what the dimensions for these are, we've got 30 inches square times 18 inches deep. So let's just go ahead and run a quick volume calculation on those as well, just so we can get all of our cubic yardage here.

So for C, we can go ahead and grab the same takeoff that we were just using there. Our concrete one, we've set it to the default, that's great. Let's go ahead and grab that volume and start running it.

Actually, you know what, this one's inside. So let's start with this one up here. Sorry about that.

We're going to grab our volume takeoff. We are going to just do this whole square here. Excellent.

So that one is going to be 35 cubic yards for C. Let's just go ahead and hit control and C and we will copy that one and we can paste the other one over here, drag it over this one, looks like it'll be exactly the same. Excellent. We've got 0.35 cubic yards for each of those.

And now we just have D and B to do. Let's go ahead and grab our volume measurement once again, and we will go ahead and do D. That's going to be our measurement for D. And we'll go ahead and measure B as well. Just grab each of these corners here, get ourselves a nice square for those pad footings.

Awesome. So that is going to be our takeoff. Now what we should do is just change the names of these.

So this is going to be pad footing C here. Let's make sure that we've got this name correct. We're just going to call this one pad footing C. And we're going to call this one also pad footing C here.

And this one is going to be pad footing D. Let's go ahead and delete that. We've got pad footing D. All right. And then over to the final one, click on that to get it selected and go ahead and type in pad footing B as well.

Great. So that is going to be our concrete takeoff for the foundation. Let's go ahead and just review that down in the markups bar to make sure that that looks good.

A quick reminder before we do that to just save our work. So up here in file, we can hit save. Make sure that we're going to save all that good work that we've just done.

And a good way to find these takeoffs in the markups bar is actually going to be a search. If we want to look for our pad footings, we could just type in the word pad and we can see what is going to show up here. So for all of these pads, we're going to have the total volume of concrete for the combined amount of them.

But we're also going to have the amount of concrete for each individual one. And let's go ahead and search for just concrete as well. So that's going to include our continuous concrete footing at 2500 psi.

And that's going to give us the total cubic yardage for that also. So that is going to be our concrete takeoff for the basement foundation level of this home.