Discover how to effectively use a tool chest for takeoffs in your project management tasks, especially when dealing with common features, such as hardwood base in various rooms. Learn how to create and use a tool in your tool chest that simplifies and speeds up the process of measuring and marking off these common elements.
Key Insights
- Creating a tool in your tool chest for commonly used elements, such as hardwood base, can save time and streamline the takeoff process. This tool stores the specifications, line widths, and colors, eliminating the need to recreate these details each time the element is used.
- There are two modes within the tool chest that can be utilized for a takeoff: markup mode and properties mode. Markup mode allows you to copy exactly the markup and the measurement of a previous takeoff, while properties mode transforms the dimensions of the specific takeoff into a more generic item for future use.
- The tool chest can be used to do base takeoffs in different rooms or on different floors easily and quickly. All the takeoffs done using the tool appear in the markups bar, providing an overview of individual and total lengths and specific details like color and specification sections.
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Picking up where we left off, we just added your first tool to the toolbox. So what that has just done is it has added that hardwood-based takeoff and all of the associated properties into our tool chest. And what our tool chest is, is it's really just a repository for all of the different types of takeoffs that we are going to do on this project.
So next time I want to do a takeoff of hardwood base, whether it is in a different room or on a different floor, I don't have to go through the process of creating another item, naming it hardwood base, adding in the specifications section, making any changes to the colors or the line widths. I already have it in my tool chest for me to grab and utilize very easily. When something gets added to the tool chest, there are two modes within the tool chest that you can utilize a takeoff for.
So the first mode, as you can see right now, is markup mode. And that would be, if I want to copy exactly the markup and the measurement of the takeoff that I've already done, I could simply grab it from the tool chest and put it on my plans again. This could be for really common things that you see on a plan all the time.
Let's say there's a lot of closets like this within a plan. Instead of us maybe having to do an area takeoff of every single closet, maybe we would just create a tool, which would be the area of that closet. And then every time we see that, we would just grab our tool, drop it on there, and that would cover the area takeoff for us.
We're not going to utilize that right now, but that is the markup mode of the my tool chest. We'll delete that. And if we go to the tool that we've just created and right click, the other mode within my tools is going to be the properties mode.
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So let's click on the properties mode. And what you can see, that has basically transformed the actual dimensions of the hardwood takeoff that we've done into a more generic hardwood takeoff item for us to then use moving forward. So the next time I want to do a base takeoff, I simply click on my tool chest that is related to base, and I just pick up with my takeoffs where I left off.
So let's click the markup list and get that out of the way. So all I did is clicked on this tool that I've just created, and that's my hardwood base, and I will pick up from where I was and continue my takeoff. And I'm just going to find the corners here and just snap to these corners.
When we get to the door, we're going to hit ENTER. We're going to go over to the other side. I'm going to zoom in a bit.
We're going to go to the other side of the door, and then we're going to take it up to this wall here. We'll click and then we'll hit ENTER. Assuming there's not going to be base on this wall quite yet, you can look at a detail if there is one.
Let's go back up to the top of the screen and start taking off the closet here. We will just do this little stem wall. We will go into the closet.
We're going to assume that the base runs all the way into the closet here, and we're going to go back to the door. We will hit ENTER. Again, we'll go to the other side of this sliding door here, pick up our takeoff, and we'll just go to this door because there's obviously no base in front of the door.
We can go down past the door and pick up our base on this wall. We can ride our base all the way down here up to this door. Again, enter to stop my takeoff.
We can click here and continue to move. We're going to go through that window because there will be base involved. Go down to the corner here and under this window, and then back up to this door.
Also, instead of hitting enter to stop our takeoff, we can also hit the C key if we want to use our other hand. If you are right-handed with the mouse and you don't want to take your hand off the mouse to hit ENTER on the right-hand side every time, you could also use the C key to stop the takeoffs as well. So what we have just done is our hardwood base takeoff based on the tool that we created for hardwood base.
Now any other time we want to do base, we just grab this and we start to do the takeoff with it. Let's quickly review what we have done in the markups bar. We click on the markups bar and we can see that all seven of those different takeoff items for hardwood base show up down here in my bar.
As we start to scroll over to the right-hand side, we can see any other associated item with these takeoffs. We can see the lengths of each of the individual ones as well as the total length of all of the hardwood base that I've just taken off. We can scroll over to the right-hand side and we can see the color and we can see that specification section column that we've created as well.
But just to show us that the specification section that we created, it did apply to each one of those items because we made a tool out. So let's get back to finishing up our base here. Let's hit this markups list so it goes away.
The scope of our job today is to take off the guest room as well as the music room. We've done the base in the guest room. We only excluded this bathroom because the assumption is that there will be some tile or tile base in there.
We did not put base on this little half wall here. Let's actually do that. There isn't necessarily a specification that I'm seeing for it other than this note 11.
That note 11 just calls for a built-in tabletop. So let's add some base to this wall. That would make sense to have some base on it.
And we'll run some base right up to where the built-in goes. We will just run it up the wall, over, and then turn it into the built-in and there won't be base back here. So moving over to the music room, we can see this note 15 right in the center.
And note 15 is going to say, free spanning bridge to support three full-size pianos. Okay, so that's explaining what the space is. And then finish floor to be hardwood.
So finish floor to be hardwood. We will also assume that base would be hardwood as well. So let us do a takeoff of this.
Starting just past the door, we will go up to this corner and up to this corner. Hit ENTER. And let's take a look at the elevation here to confirm.
Do we think there's going to be base running all the way through here or not? So let's go back to my elevations here. Let's go to the thumbnails over on the left-hand side. And let's go to sheet 11.
This is going to be the west elevation. So this is going to be the bottom side of our screen on the floor plan. And I see all of these doors being full length.
So not going to be a lot of base on this side because there's a lot of doors. And let's go to this sheet 12 here to capture the other side of the music room. And the other side of the music room just looks like it has these two windows up high but nothing else that would stop us from running base continuously through.
So that gives us a lot of good information to go back to plan 6 and to continue this takeoff. So back into the music room area. So as we saw, the base will be running continuous through this length because those windows are up high.
We'll run it over into this corner. And then we will bring it down to this pocket door and we will hit C or Enter to stop the takeoff. We will start it up again on the other side of the pocket door opening.
And this window is going to be a full size down to the floor. So no base through that. We'll hit C. We will grab these little slivers of wall here.
And same with this one. And same with this one over here. And then we will finish out the remaining corner of this music room.
So that is our hardwood base takeoff for the full scope of our work today. And if we want to review anything, we can just go down to our markups bar. If we want to get a rough idea of the total that we've just taken off, that is always going to show just up at the top of all the individual items that we've taken off here.
And there's plenty of ways to group these if we need to, but we will get into that a little further in the future. And again, just a quick reminder, let's go ahead and save this work right now to make sure that we capture everything that we have just done.
