Learn how to utilize the count tool in architectural plans for precise calculation of elements such as plumbing fixtures, doors, and windows. Follow along as an example walks you through how to categorize, color-code, and tally specific items within a floor plan and elevation views.
Key Insights
- The count tool is an efficient method for quantifying elements like plumbing fixtures within a design plan. The user can customize the count tool's properties, including color, icon, and subject, to facilitate easy identification.
- When counting doors and windows, referencing both floor plans and elevation views can provide a comprehensive understanding of the structure. Elevation views offer different visual perspectives, which can help in accurate identification of doors and windows.
- For larger-scale building plans, a dedicated door and window schedule can simplify the counting process. Each door and window is numbered and detailed with its style, size, and specific features, reducing the need for manual identification.
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Now that we have looked at layering on these plans, we can go ahead and jump into counts. With counts, let's go ahead and take off some plumbing fixtures, as well as some windows and doors. We can go up to our markups bar at the top and we can select the count tool.
With the count tool, there is going to be of course our properties bar over here, where we're going to have to give it a subject, where we can change the color or the appearance. And we can also change the icon that shows up when we do a count, as well as the specification section. So for right now, let's just type in, we're going to do toilets.
And we'll take that label away, we don't need that. And let's make these blue. And we'll keep it with the check mark.
Specification section, let's say this will be, you know, 2200. You could just do a blanket, you know, 2200 plumbing fixtures. So maybe let's just do that.
Let's just solve this one, 22,000 plumbing fixtures. And we'll put that all under one kind of generic heading to make it easier for us. We've changed the color, we have it as plumbing fixtures now, let's go ahead and count that toilet.
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It's really just as simple as clicking right on the toilet. And then I've hit ENTER. When we want to go and take off this sink here, what we can do is grab that count tool again, and just go ahead and, actually let's not, let's grab this one, let's copy this and let's paste it over.
And when we paste it over to the sink, we can simply change the title of it to sink from toilet. And we can keep the color the same, we can keep the specification section the same. Now let's go ahead and grab that and copy that one.
And then let's paste it over to the built-in shower and tub enclosure. And we'll go ahead and change the name of that quickly to, we'll say, bathtub enclosure slash shower. So quick and dirty way to do counts.
If we were doing a large scale building with lots of different fixture types, we would get a little bit more specific about the type of fixture. But this is only going to be one room and there's only a few of these fixtures in here. So no need to spend time to build out different tools or tool chests.
So that's going to be our plumbing fixtures. Now let's go ahead and take a look at doors and windows. So the floor plan is one area to get an idea of the doors and the windows, but elevations are going to be extremely helpful.
So let's go into our thumbnails and let's scroll down to our sheets 11 and 12. So just to give ourselves a visual here, we've got a few doors. On the west elevation of the music room, we have these two.
It could be fixed windows, they could be doors, we'll find that out. But it's helpful to reference the elevations just to get a another visual concept of what it is that we're looking at. We see the west elevation, we've got this on the music room, and we've got these couple of windows of these doors on the guest room.
Over to the south elevation here, we can see that we have the door out to this balcony and then a window right here. And then just going up to the east elevation, we just have one window there, as well as these two windows. So that's great.
That gives us a really good idea of what it is we're looking at. Now, some plans will have a dedicated door and window schedule. And luckily, this plan set does.
If these plans do not have a dedicated door and window schedule, the exterior elevations will be a really good place to do the counting of these windows and doors. We would be able to do the takeoffs from here. But luckily, our plan does actually have a door and window schedule.
So let's jump down to page number 14. And page number 14 here, A8.2, this is our door and window schedule. We can see that each of the doors is numbered out with a style of door and a size, as well as any specifics.
So are they glazed? Are they tempered? Going over to windows, that is going to be the same situation. Each window is numbered and labeled specifically with the type of window, the size, and the frame material. So this makes it a lot easier for us.
We don't have to go in and determine all of the different window types. We can simply just go ahead and count them up.
