This article offers detailed instructions on how to make a stucco takeoff, including tips and tricks for getting precise measurements. It guides readers through the process of creating stucco takeoffs using area takeoffs on Bluebeam, with helpful advice on using the shift key for clean angles and utilizing the polygon cutout tool.
Key Insights:
- The shift key can help create clean 90 or 180 degree angles when making takeoffs, even without a defined line. This is particularly useful when drawing lines in area takeoffs on Bluebeam.
- The polygon cutout tool is effective for excluding specific areas, like windows, from a stucco takeoff. Tracing the outline of the window with this tool immediately excludes the window area from the stucco takeoff.
- It's important to save work frequently and conduct multiple checks to ensure the most accurate takeoff. This includes straightening out corners and checking that all necessary areas have been included in the stucco takeoff. Adjustments can be made after the fact if necessary.
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Let's look at our stucco takeoff. Let's of course grab an area takeoff here and let's make a stucco takeoff for us to use. So I already have a stucco finish one called out here, but let's just go ahead and retype that in.
Stucco finish. We can delete this label as we are not using labels. We can do a change of color or a change of fill if we want to.
Let's put a hatch to this. Let's put a 30% hatch on it. And for a specification section, let's go ahead and put 0923, I'm sorry, 092423 cement stucco.
We'll create that and you will set it as our default. And we can also make a out of this one once we do the takeoff. So let's just start at the top corner here and follow our corners along.
Another helpful tip and trick here is if you are following lines or even if there isn't necessarily a line to follow, you can always hold the shift key down and the shift key will give you a clean 90 degree or 100 degree angle to do your takeoff from. If for whatever reason I had to go across this area and there wasn't a defined line to use, I could always hold in the shift key and just cut right over. So that's a helpful tip when doing things like drawing lines in area takeoffs on Bluebeam and we will be using it shortly.
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We're going to go over to the corner here and we're going to go down to the elevation line. So what we mentioned just a second ago is we don't have a straight line to carry this over, but we know that our stucco finish is going to continue as this earthwork will rise up and cover it after it's finished. So right now let's just hold in the shift key and let's just pull all the way over to where we would line up with this side of the wall.
And a way to do that is I like to bring the screen over to align with that wall and we'll hold in the shift key and we will bring our takeoff all the way over to the edge and we'll click left and we will resume doing the takeoff. So that's an easy way to get us back to square. And now we found our wall again and we can take our wall all the way up to the corner of the roof and back to where it started.
So that is our stucco takeoff and of course with these takeoffs you can always alter things. So my corner here was not perfect so let's go ahead and straighten that out a little bit so we don't have any sort of excess. Make that a totally straight line to make sure that we're getting our corner perfect.
We'll go ahead and pull that in a little bit and there we go. That's a good stucco takeoff. We've got stucco there.
This appears to be stucco as well on this column based on the finish. So let's go ahead and grab our area takeoff and do that again. Perfect.
And let's just add this one to the tool chest so we will be likely using stucco quite a bit on this project. We've added it to the tool chest. Let's just go ahead and convert that into properties mode so we can grab stucco whenever we need to use it.
And let me hit it again. I did right click and hit properties mode and I did and it's taking a little while to change so let's just let that load up. Let me try that one more time.
Hit properties mode. There we go. Finally changed on me.
So okay we've done one of our stucco facades and we can see that we have a window in the middle here that we're obviously not putting stucco on and that we've already counted up. So you may recall the cutout tools that we talked about earlier. This is where we get to use our polygon cutout tool.
So let's go ahead and grab the polygon cutout and let's grab the corners of this window here and let's just trace the outline of the window all the way around. And immediately once I trace the outline of that window with the polygon cutout tool we can see that it excludes the window area from my stucco takeoff. So really helpful tool and we're going to be using that a lot on the exterior.
So while we are on stucco let's go to a different elevation and continue to bring the guest room with our stucco takeoff. We can scroll down to the south elevation here and we can see that there's plenty of stucco for us to take off. So let's go back to our tool chest let's grab our stucco takeoff and let's keep moving here.
We do see this column so let's make sure that we get the facade of the column that we didn't get on the last elevation. We'll pull this one all the way down to the floor level. We'll use shift to pull it over and then we will pull it back up to the top of the column.
There we go and now let's just do the rest of the facade here. We're going to all of our different columns and again we have a situation where we have earthwork that is in the way and we don't necessarily have a final finished elevation here but let's just grab this and pull it down to about here. That will be our assumption and then we'll hold shift and we will pull over to be equal to these lines and then we will go ahead and let me correct that slightly we can fix it after the facts and we can go ahead and grab this wall again take it up to where this railing is we will do a cut out down around the railing pull it back up to our starting place and there we go we've got our stucco take off let's go ahead and clean up this corner down here you can just see our extra point let's pull that in there we go we've cleaned up that corner so let's grab our polygon cutout tool up at the top here and we see that we have the siding and the window so let's just cut out that entire section here so we will trace this siding all around and we'll go ahead and cut that out so easy as that we have our stucco take off on this elevation and we have a cutout for its siding and for the window which we can go ahead and capture later and let's go over to the next elevation and finish out our guest room here so now we're on the east elevation and let's finish out the rest of the stucco here so let's go to our tool chest let's grab our stucco take off and let's just go ahead and finish this out up to the corner down to this corner here so again we don't have a line drawn but we know that we have the floor finished so we can go ahead and carry our take off all the way over until we line up and then we will drag it back up to the top of this corner and there we go we have our stucco here let's go ahead and pull this corner out a little bit more to make sure it's even there we go excellent so that is our stucco here and we'll go ahead and do a cutout of this window as well let's go ahead and grab our polygon cutout tool we have to zoom in a little bit make sure we get the exterior of that window perimeter get the entire thing and there we go we have our cutout so we have completed our exterior stucco take off on the guest room let's go ahead and save our work and then we can move on to the siding that we can take off as well
