Learn the process of conducting wall takeoffs for both interior and exterior partitions, focusing on the framing, sheathing, drywall, and insulation components. This article provides insights into using estimating software tools like Bluebeam to streamline the takeoff process and enhance the efficiency of construction estimations.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates the importance and method of conducting wall takeoffs for interior and exterior partitions, with a focus on framing, sheathing, and drywall components. The process can be done in separate steps or together depending on the chosen strategy.
- Bluebeam, an estimating software, allows the user to copy previous framing takeoffs and apply them to sheathing or drywall takeoffs, reducing redundancy and saving time. The software also facilitates the calculation of total wall area needed for exterior sheathing by adding a defined depth to the length.
- While conducting takeoffs for exterior partitions, it's critical to account for drywall on both sides. This ensures accuracy when ordering materials, as the exterior sheathing square footage will need to be doubled. The same rule applies to the interior partitions as well.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
All right, so we have just done some takeoffs of our interior partitions. We already have our takeoffs of our exterior walls, but we've only done the takeoffs of the framing portions of those. Now let's go ahead and get a count for all of our drywall and our sheathing on this level.
We're going to look at both the interior partitions as well as the exterior partitions while we're doing these takeoffs. So there are a couple of different ways to do wall takeoffs. You could do the framing and one takeoff, and then you could do the sheathing and the drywall in a separate takeoff.
If you're using other estimating software, you have the ability to sometimes create assemblies which would count up both the framing and the drywall and insulation all within one item. For the purposes of Bluebeam, we will show you how to use the takeoffs that we've already done for our framing and simply copy them over into our drywall takeoffs so we don't have to spend a ton of extra time redoing anything that we've already done. And we really just want to give you this kind of helpful skill set to use as you start to work on more and more estimates in Bluebeam.
So let's grab our exterior wall takeoff. That's this red here. And we can double check on it by pulling up our markups bar.
And you can see that as soon as you click on a certain takeoff on the screen, it is going to take you to exactly where it shows down in the markups bar. We can see that, yep, this is our exterior 2x6 stud wall. And what we're going to do is we're just going to select all of our exterior takeoffs.
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We have one clicked. We're going to go ahead and hold and shift and click the other one. And then go ahead and hit shift again and click the other one.
And just tracing it all around, we can see these different control points which means all of our exterior takeoff has been selected here. And all we're going to do is just right click. We're going to go ahead and hit paste.
Now we can see that that just copied that entire takeoff for us. And what we're going to do is we are going to change the properties of all of this into our exterior sheathing takeoff. We're simply going to go to properties and we are going to call this our exterior sheathing.
We don't necessarily have a specification called out on the plans for the type of sheathing. However, we are just going to go ahead and build out a generic takeoff for it. Go ahead and give this a color here.
We'll just make this a darker red. Call that the exterior sheathing. All right.
And we can go down to our finishes here and we can call this 092910 gypsum board in our specification section. We're going to go ahead and add that to the tool chest because we will be using that one again. And then all we're going to do is grab that takeoff that we've built out here and really just drag that into place.
So you can see it's going to snap with all of our other exterior items. And it's just a clean overlap there of the takeoff that we've previously done. You may need to do a slight adjustment here.
Let me just click this a few times. Grab this once more. And we'll just slide this whole thing over into place.
And there we go. We can see that that takeoff has aligned perfectly with the one that we've done underneath it. And when we go down to our markups bar, we can see that this gypsum board section that we've just created is going to be populated with our exterior sheathing.
And what we can also do here is we know that the framing had certain heights that we were carrying with it. If we want to get ourselves a wall area of sheathing in addition to just that linear footage, we're going to go ahead and do that now. If we go to our markups bar and we go back to where our exterior stud wall framing was, we can see that at the guest room we were assuming 11 feet high and then at the music room we were assuming 13 feet high.
So let's go ahead and click on the music room exterior sheathing, both top and bottom here. We have them both selected and we can hit this units drop down. In this units drop down we can see that we can give this a depth of 13 feet high since what we're looking for is a wall area because we're doing sheathing.
We're looking for something in square footage. We have the length input already and we've just added a 13 foot depth to it. Now when we go over to our totals drop down here up in the top, we click that totals drop down and we see that the length remains the same but we've been able to calculate that total wall area for that exterior sheathing.
In that square footage that's really how you would order a product like drywall where it comes in a board form. So let's also just do that for our takeoffs at the guest room as well. Go ahead and grab this exterior sheathing item and remember we said that we are assuming an 11 foot height at the guest room.
We're going to say 11 feet there and we're going to go over to our totals drop down and we're going to see that this is going to be our total wall area of exterior sheathing around the guest room. We've gotten our exterior framing completed. We've got our exterior sheathing completed.
Let's go ahead and look at our interior partitions as well. And what we can actually do is on these exterior partitions, looking at this all the way around here, we can see that everywhere that this exterior partition goes it is going to get drywall on the inside of it as well. So let's just make ourselves a note to say for all of these exterior sheathing items we're going to highlight them all in our properties bar and let's just say assume drywall both sides.
We will know that when we have to order a certain amount of sheathing to sheathe in these walls, whatever this number is that we've come up with here, this 15,000 square foot, that is going to be doubled when we go to order this material. We have completed all of our exterior sheathing here as well as the interior layer of sheathing for those exterior partitions and now what we can do is go ahead and sheathe our interior partitions as well. So some of these red take-off items here, we've got this typical 2x4 interior stud wall.
Let's just go ahead and grab those and we can do the same copy and paste exercise that we did before. We're just going to be hitting shift and we're just going to be grabbing these interior partitions. We're going to go ahead and right click and hit copy and then we are going to go ahead and paste these and again we're going to take these items come over to the properties bar here and we are going to call this interior sheathing.
We've got our interior sheathing built out. Again let's just make that this dark red color here. Let's go ahead down to our specification section and put this on our 092910 gypsum board as well and again we are just going to grab these markups and really just drag them into place over the markups that we had made previously and it looks like I forgot a little piece here so if you ever do forget something like that you could always go in and hit set as default and then just go ahead and grab a poly length.
We grab that poly length we can see that interior sheathing shows up here because we did set it as our default and let's just go ahead and run this little section wall right here. Go ahead and hit ENTER and there we go. So just reviewing all of this we have this little strip here which is interior partition.
We've got this wall which is going to be an interior partition as well as this wall. Okay these are both need drywall on both sides. Same here, same here and then down for this little wall here we've got this which will need drywall on both sides.
Same with this little wing wall right here as well. So same thing here we're just going to grab all of our interior sheathing. We're going to go ahead and hit shift and bulk select and just say assume drywall both sides as well.
That was a relatively quick way to still do two separate types of takeoffs to really see if there was any difference but also kind of use the work that we've already done in here for the framing component of the takeoff and really just copy and paste it to allow us to easily get some of those drywall and exterior sheathing items.
