This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to use Bluebeam for construction estimating, focusing on a detailed step-by-step estimate of a music room and guest room. It covers the entire process from opening your plan set in Bluebeam to exporting the quantities to Excel or Google Sheets for final construction estimates.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step process on how to use Bluebeam for construction estimating, specifically focusing on a music room and a guest room in a plan set.
- In addition to basic orientation, the article also delves into detail about the different tools available in Bluebeam and how to use them for a comprehensive takeoff on the plan set.
- The final part of the process involves exporting the quantities to Excel or Google Sheets, and using provided cost per unit figures to come up with a finalized construction estimate for the specific rooms.
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, hello everyone and welcome to our course. This is going to be an intro to bluebeam estimating. This is going to be a follow-up of pfc 121 and what we're going to be doing in this course is we are going to be taking the plan set that you all focused on in pfc 121 and we are actually going to be doing a detailed step-by-step construction estimate of the music room and the guest room portions of that plan set.
So what we're first going to do is we're going to open up bluebeam and then we're going to explain a little bit about what we're going to do and then we will move along into the course. To open up bluebeam we are just going to well first we're going to make sure we have it installed on our device and then we're just going to navigate to the shortcut out on our desktop. All right, so when we click on bluebeam this is what it is first going to look like.
We're just going to see a blank screen and what I'm going to do now is just open up the completed dataset of the plans with all of my takeoffs on them and explain a little bit about the project and then we're going to move into orienting ourselves to bluebeam learning about all the different tools that we can use and then going ahead and doing the estimate on this set of plans. So let's go ahead and I will just open up my finalized plan set where I've done all of my different takeoffs. So just to orient ourselves to the lesson today we're going to go ahead into sheet six of this set.
You can see that I have a ton of different takeoffs on the screen. Don't even focus on that right now. All we're going to do is explain the lesson for the time being and then we will go through step by step how we got each of these different takeoff items.
Our exercise for this lesson is to do a full construction estimate of the music room and the guest room portions of this plan set. No other areas are in scope other than the guest room and the music room and we are going to do a comprehensive takeoff of these items. So it's going to be all of the different trades and types of materials.
Learn Construction Estimating
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
That's going to be concrete, framing, some electrical, some plumbing, some of the finishes, some of the exterior work. We're obviously going to detail out step by step how we're going to do it but we're going to use all of the various different measurement tools within Bluebeam to do a comprehensive takeoff on the plan set. We are going to take all of those quantities that we've done a takeoff of.
We are going to export them out to Excel or Google Sheets. We are going to add in some cost per unit figures that will be provided for you during this course and we're going to use those cost figures to come up with a construction estimate using Bluebeam on how to get a finalized price for the music room and the guest room of this plan set.
