Wall height or area of walls in schedules, is it possible?

[Digger873]

Hello everybody,

I have given up on using the material's list for take offs, as I don't have the time to put that much detail into a drawing. I have created my own primitive take off sheets in excel

and just need wall lengths, (easy to do with schedules, thanks CA) but I could really use the heights of the walls or the areas of the walls for things like, how many ft of 8' concrete walls vs 6 ft or 3 ft with steps in the footers. Or the sq. footage of siding or brick, I have what the materials list provides but its not accurate, if the program generates attic walls for the energy heels of trusses or sometimes the attic walls will have siding on the attic side of them. I just don't have the time to check every detail like that in the drawing. As a builder just knowing what the cubic yards for a concrete wall is, isnt enough. When you figure labor different height walls are different prices so I have to manually figure all that out. Or when figuring out the sq footage of a gable, It would seem that seeing as CA already has that information it wouldnt be too hard to put it in the schedule options. Maybe Im wrong, or missing something. Does anybody have any ideas.

And yes I have searched the forum and cant seem to find anything on this subject.

Thanks 

[Digger873]

bump

[Digger873]

No unfortunately I am not familiar with any macros at all. I keep telling myself I need to figure it out but haven't got there yet.

I know I can get all the info one way or another, I was just wondering about a quick way to get wall heights, or areas for siding take offs. 

Preferably in a schedule.  

 

[TeaTime]

I've played with this a bit in the past and as I recall I wasn't entirely satisfied with the results. glancing again at the object properties for Walls, they certainly have a simple %length% value to pull, and they do have area, but it's more complex, like upper-layers.0.area - which means if you're dealing with pony walls then you're in for a headache if you're not familiar with Ruby and writing your own text macros. That and I seem to recall the way that macro calculates Area is a little different than how the Materials List does.

 

My honest answer is just to make adjustments to the plan so that the Materials List calculates correctly for you.

Keep in mind that you can tell the Materials List what to calculate by way of Layer Set, so you can quickly omit things like Attic Walls.

I know it's not the answer you're looking for but there's something to be said for having an accurate model that generates an accurate list of materials.

Of course, that being said Materials Lists are still often exported and tweaked externally anyway.

[Doug_N]