Mastering Plan Set Preparation and Takeoff Techniques for Efficient Quantity Estimating Workflows

Now that we have tested out all of our different types of markups, let's go ahead and delete these markups and make sure all of our plans are set to the proper scale, and then let's go ahead and learn more about the exercise that we're going to be doing, where we're going to be taking off a portion of this plan set. We can hit close on the dynamic fill, and what we can do to delete all of these markups in bulk, is we can go over to the edit drop down, and we can grab the lasso item. Now when we get the lasso, we can just draw a big circle around all of the existing markups that we have.

That is going to bulk select each of those, and then we can simply hit the delete key on our keyboard to delete those markups. Now jumping back to page five, we do have a markup that we've already created here. In addition to being able to click on the markup and delete it itself, or use the lasso tool to delete in bulk, what we can also do is click on this markups bar in the bottom left corner.

So let's click on the markups bar here, and I have a filter built in, but when you get to the markups bar, what we'll have to do first is filter this list, because the plan set itself already has some markups on it. These are not going to be related to our course, so let's hit filter list, and then go over to author, and hit the column above author, this grayed out column here. In that column, you can choose to only see markups that were created by a certain person.

So your name or your initials, choose that one, whatever shows up for you based on what you put in, choose that, and then that will create a filtered list just for you to only see your markups. This is also helpful if you have multiple estimators working on a plan set, and you want to filter through who made what markups. So down in this markups list, once we filtered it to ourselves, another way to delete markups here is we can see we have our exterior metal railings.

We could always right click on this item and delete it from this list as well. So let's do that, and we certainly will spend a lot more time in our markups list, but I just wanted to get everyone introduced to different ways to delete or manipulate markups that we have on the screen. It could be by clicking on them, it could also be by taking a few actions down in this markups list here.

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The ability to filter this column is going to be able to be shared with all of the columns as well. So any of these different columns down here in the markup list, you have the ability to filter by whether it is the page numbers, so I only want to look at certain takeoffs on a certain page, or all of the different measurement types over to the right that we will be doing throughout this course. So that's enough on the markups bar for now, we will certainly be spending more time going back to it.

We can click the markups bar and collapse it over on this three bulleted list over here. So our exercise now is to just make sure that all of our plans are to the proper scale. The way we do that, of course, is just finding the scale down in the bottom right corner.

So this one is going to be 1 8th to 1 foot. We have that set properly already. Let's go ahead to the next one, 3 16th to 1 foot.

Okay, great. Next one is also 3 16th. Correct.

This one's also 3 16th. This one is also. This one is 1 quarter inch, which we have correctly.

Jumping down to plans 11 and 12 here, we got 3 16th. Great. 3 16th.

Next plan here, roof plan, a 6.1,3 16th. And then it looks like this window and door plan doesn't have a scale. These particular details, it looks like there might be some different scales.

This is a 3 inch to a 1 foot. This is a 1⁄2 inch, so we won't do a particular scale for these pages. We also may not need to, you know, take off as in-depth on some of these.

So the detail pages we won't need to put a scale to. And let's just check this last one here, this electrical plan, 3 16th to 1 foot. Great.

These are notes pages here, 20 and 21. Jumping into 22. I've got structural, 23,24,25.

Okay, great. These structural plans, they don't really have a scale. We may do a little bit of take off from them, hopefully just for counting, not for actual take off, but we'll talk about that when we get into it.

Okay. Now that our plan set is set to scale properly, let's talk about the exercise that we are going to perform today in this course. Let's jump over to plan 6. On plan 6, we can see the music room and the guest room portions of this plan set.

So I'm going to highlight both of them here. We've got the music room and we've got the guest room. Now our task for this course is to do a complete quantity take off of both the music room and the guest room.

This is going to be a full quantity take off. It is going to include structural components, architectural, both interior and exterior, and we also have an electrical plan. We are going to do some take offs of the electrical components as well, some of the fixtures and some of the things that are more easy to count up.

This is going to be the task for today and we are going to go through a comprehensive approach to doing take offs on these plans and building on our skill sets as things go. We will be starting with some more simple items like some easy counts, some easy linears, and some easy areas, and we will start to build up in difficulty as the course goes on. I will also continue to add in maybe some new tips and tricks that you can do in Bluebeam, some new functionality that can help make things easier for you as we do them at scale.

That is our exercise for today.