Explore how to review measurements and markups, add additional information to them, and produce a construction estimate using Bluebeam. Learn the value of carrying out a visual review to ensure all values are correct, and how to use custom columns within Bluebeam to add any different information before exporting the data to Excel.
Key Insights
- After completing all takeoffs on the plans, it's important to perform a visual review to ensure all values are captured correctly. This process helps identify any potential errors that could affect the construction estimate.
- Custom columns within Bluebeam can be used to add specific information to the data before exporting it to Excel. For instance, a 'cost per unit' column can be created to input costs while doing the takeoff.
- While Bluebeam provides features to track costs, exporting takeoffs into Excel and applying costs there often proves easier to maneuver and manipulate. Applying costs in Excel allows for bulk processing, which could be more efficient.
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, welcome back, everyone, and here we have our final lesson of the course, and this lesson is going to be focused on reviewing all of our measurements and markups, adding some additional information to them, things like costs per unit, potentially responsible subcontractors, and the goal of doing all of that is so we can really pull this whole exercise together and produce a construction estimate from this set of plans, so that's going to be the main focus for today, so let's just go ahead and jump right into it. After we're fully complete with all of our takeoffs on the plans, the first thing that we're going to do is really just jump down to our markups bar and really do a visual review, just to make sure that we have captured everything. So just doing a quick cursory look here, we can see all of our different specification sections.
We've got our structural concretes, our masonry, our metal railings, our wood framing, and we can see the reason that we do this review is, one, we just want to make sure that we have values in all of these items, that nothing looks off, you know, that there's nothing that says, like, a zero or something that could totally be throwing off our estimate here, and also just doing a general review to make sure that all the takeoffs that we did are going to be the correct type. So obviously, if I'm looking at something like concrete, I do just want to review and make sure that we did do a volume takeoff for concrete and that the item is in cubic yards. So for me, this is really just kind of a cursory review of everything that we've already done.
I'm not expecting to see any sort of mistakes here, but it is good to just do a quick review of your own work. So let's go ahead and continue to scroll down. We've got all of our base into some of our 7 and 800 items here, roofing, we've got windows, our stucco, all area takeoffs, that's great.
Chips and board with all of our different sheathing types here, and then jumping down to our 09, some of our finishes, some of our plumbing, and some of our electrical. Okay, great. We've done a quick look over everything that we have done takeoffs on.
The next thing that we're going to do is we're going to look at how you can use custom columns within Bluebeam to really kind of add any different information that you may like before we go ahead and export this out. So the main area where we're going to be finalizing this estimate is going to be in Excel. We are going to be taking the measurements out of Bluebeam, putting them in Excel, and really coming together with our final cost that we're going to submit to the owner.
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What we can do in Bluebeam though before we do that is some other helpful adjustments. If we go over to our markups list and we click down, we can see this columns list here. Now you may remember this columns list from earlier in the course when we added in our specification section column.
So what we can do with these columns is we can go into manage columns down at the bottom, and we can see custom columns. Now I've created one of those already. So look, we have specification section in there.
That's one that we've created. Some other columns that folks typically create in here, you could create a cost per unit column so that if you happen to know the cost offhand while you're doing the takeoff, you can populate it in there. For this course, we weren't going to focus so much on costs as much as doing the takeoffs first.
And now we're going to be applying the cost after the fact. But if you did happen to know what the kind of cost per cubic yard of concrete was, and you wanted to input it into Bluebeam while you're doing your takeoff, I'll show you how we can do that right here. We would go into our manage columns, into our custom columns area.
We would hit add, and then we would just add the new column name, and let's just call this one cost per unit. And we can go to our type dropdown, and we can see that there are a lot of different types of columns that we can create here. Can be just like a checkbox, yes or no.
It can be a multiple choice dropdown, a date, a formula, a number, or a text item. This one's going to be a number, of course. And we can go down to the format dropdown, and we can even choose currency, since this is going to be a dollar value.
We'll leave our decimal places at two. We'll leave our currency symbol at dollar. So right then and there, we've created this custom column for cost per unit, and let's go ahead and hit okay.
So again, for the purposes of our course today, we were mostly just focusing on getting our quantities done through Bluebeam. If you do happen to know some of the cost per unit offhand while you're doing the takeoff, you would have the ability to input that information. We can see that we have just added a cost per unit column, and all the way on the right-hand side of my screen, you can see cost per unit showing up.
If, let's say, we just want to throw the cost for concrete into here, or while we're doing the actual takeoffs for concrete, we know what that cost is going to be. Let's just multi-select by holding down shift and clicking all these items. Let's go ahead and right-click, and let's go to properties.
So down at the bottom in the custom section, right next to where specification section is, it's that same area that we've been inputting things earlier on, if we know that, let's say, concrete is going to be $100 per cubic yard, we can easily input that in. And as soon as we do that, it is going to update our reporting on the screen, and it is going to show us that we now have a $100 per cubic yard cost for concrete. So let's see, put that in there, hit ENTER, and we can see that it puts the cost in there.
So that's going to give us a total as well. So there are multiple ways to kind of track the cost in Bluebeam or outside of Bluebeam for an estimate. My preferred way, and the way that I find to be easier, is to export all of our takeoffs into Excel and then bulk apply cost there.
It can be easier to just kind of maneuver and manipulate with Excel. So that's why we're going to do it that way. But if you do happen to know some of the costs offhand, like I said, you can easily just input them in here.
Okay. We will come back to inputting cost per unit later in the lesson. In the next video, I will introduce another custom column that is a common workflow when estimating in Bluebeam.
