Setting Up Your First Hardwood Base Takeoff in Bluebeam Using Poly Length and Custom Columns

So, we have saved our plan set, and now we're ready to start doing our first takeoff. Our first takeoff, let's just choose hardwood base, or wall base. Looking at this note 16 right here, and then looking over at the legend, 16 is calling for carpet flooring per the owner, so there isn't necessarily like an elevation or a specific finish schedule calling out which type of base here.

So, let's just assume hardwood base, as we do see that with carpet often. So, to do a base, we will have to do a poly length takeoff here, so we can choose poly length from up in the top. And before we even do the takeoff, it's really helpful to get in a habit of looking at other plans and details to really wrap our head around what it is that we're going to be taking off.

So, in this specific instance, I see that we have some big windows, we also have some doors, and some more smaller windows in the area that we're going to be doing this base takeoff. And that's important to us because we'll have to know, are we to carry the base through these windows, do these windows go down to the floor level where we're not able to put base there? So, before we do the takeoff, let's actually go quickly over to the elevations and take a look at what we see on these windows. So, we see that north is kind of pointing over this way, so the north elevation is going to be over on the left-hand side of the screen.

The south elevation is going to be over on the right-hand side of the screen. So, when we go to plan 11, we can see the south elevation, so this is what was just on the right side of our screen. And we can see that this window does not go all the way down to the finished floor line, so we will be able to carry our base continuously through it.

So, scrolling out a bit and then pulling up to this west elevation here, which is where we will go after we do the south elevation, we can see that this small window does not go down to the finished floor. Let's take that same assumption with these two windows as well, because it's not specifically called out, but it does not appear that these would go down to the finished floor. And we do see a door here, and obviously this door does go down to the finished floor.

So, now we know that we can carry base through all of these windows and obviously not the door. So, let us go back to plan 6 here, and in plan 6 we can actually start to do our takeoff. So, let's go up to this poly length again and click on the poly length.

And just start, you know, clicking from one corner down to the next, down to the next, and down to the next. I'm going to hit ENTER here and stop this for a moment. So, what we've done right there is we've just done a measurement.

It isn't necessarily at this point associated with any specific takeoff or material or anything else on the plan. So, for us to take the next step to associate this measurement with a specific material, we can do that a couple of ways in Bluebeam. The easiest way is to go to this properties cog on the left hand side.

So, the author is going to be your name or your initials, whatever you've registered for Bluebeam under. The subject, this is where we can give this takeoff item a specific name. So, let's call this one hardwood base.

We'll hit ENTER and hardwood base will be the name of this takeoff type. We can give it a label if we want and I'll show you what that does. So, if you type in label and then you go down to show caption and you click check on show caption, all that label does is it just visibly shows up next to that takeoff if you have this caption checked on.

So, that caption box will pull up the label name as well as the actual takeoff length that you've just completed. For me, this kind of gets in the way and I don't like to use it very often, but if you do like to have that visual reminder, you can hit show caption and you can have your labels and your takeoff that you've just completed right next to that takeoff item. So, let's turn that off for now.

So, we've typed in the subject, we've looked at the label. You can control a lot of other things about this takeoff. So, the different colors of the line or fill if it was like an area, opacity, line width, line styles.

These are going to be drop downs where there's lots of different dashed options. What you can also do is control how the edges of the line look. It can be an arrow, it can be a triangle or a diamond or something like that.

For our case, we're not going to really mess with that too much. Going down here, we see custom. So, there is an ability for you to build out custom columns and use custom kind of descriptions and tags for each one of these.

And one that we're going to do right now is going to be specification section. That's going to be a really easy way for us to group our estimate by spec section and make it even easier for us if we need to go to a subcontractor or a vendor and get some pricing on these takeoffs. We will be able to group it very easily by specification section.

So, we can just take all of the 03 items for example, send them to our concrete subcontractor and it would really make our job easier for us. So, to do that, let's build out a custom column here. Let's go down to our markups list at the bottom.

So, click the markups list. We already have that filter established to only show things that are authored by us. So, in the markups list, we can go over to the drop down under markups.

In that drop down, there is an area for columns. So, this just toggles on and off all of the different columns that we can see in the markups list. So, for example, if I were to take off a certain column like author, so we can see author right there.

If I go to this drop down and I go into columns, I can click author. That's going to make that column disappear. If I click it again, it's going to make the author column reappear.

So, really just want to highlight the point that this markup bar, like everything else that we've looked at in Bluebeam, is extremely flexible and very configurable for what one specific user wants to see. So, if you like to look at this a certain way, you like more columns, you want fewer columns, there is a lot of flexibility for you to go in here and to make these changes in this columns area. And what we can also do in the columns area is this is where we can create our own custom ones.

So, if we go to the bottom of the list and we hit manage columns, this is going to be where we can turn things on or off, we can reorder them, but what we can also do is click this custom columns tab and this is where we can create our own. So, we said that we would like to create one that says specification sections, spec section. So, we've created a text column now that says specification section that we can use to fill in the spec section of all the different takeoffs.

There are other options for types of custom columns. They could be check marks, they could be multiple choice columns, they could have formulas, they could be numbers, dates, or text. For right now, let's just create a specification section custom column that is a text column.

So, we will create it and then we will hit okay. We have then created that custom specification section column. Now, let's click on this hardwood base takeoff that we've just done.

So, you can see when I click on the item down here, it brings me back to the takeoff on the screen. So, you can control or manipulate these takeoffs from either clicking on the takeoff itself or clicking down here in the markups bar. And we can see that the specification section custom column has popped up over here.

So, since we are doing this hardwood base, let's give this an 06. Actually, let's see if I already have this in here somewhere. Yes, okay.

So, I already have this drop-down list because I've typed in many of these specification sections. It won't be a drop-down list for you guys as you are creating these on your own right now. But for this one, let's type in 06 22 13 standard pattern wood trim.

So, now we have our specification section associated with this takeoff. And we've done any sort of changes that we want to make sure that we know that when we're using this purple color, it is hardwood base. And the reason that we configure all this now is because any other time that we want to use this hardwood base takeoff, we're not going to have to do any of this again.

So, we can configure a takeoff to exactly what we want and then we can do what is called add it to our tool chest. So, let's click that. Let's add that to the tool chest and let's put that in my tools.

And now you can see the tool in the chest. Now, one thing to note about the tool chest, what you see on my screen is going to look different from what you see on your screen. You'll see that I already have a lot of tools populated under the my tools section of the tool chest.

That's because I have done some previous takeoffs in my instance of Bluebeam and I've created takeoffs on previous projects that are still living in the my tools area. Now, when you first open up Bluebeam and what you are likely seeing on your screen is that you don't have any tools in the toolbox until we have just created the one that we just created. So, don't be alarmed that you are looking at maybe something different on my screen than what you're seeing on your screen.

It's just because I have spent a lot of time in this Bluebeam instance and I've already built a handful of tools. And over the course of the class, your toolbox will start to be built out as well and it will resemble a little bit more closely what you see on my screen now. I just wanted to make a quick note of that.

Let's stop there and pick it up in the next video.