Square footage label for ALL floors

[hyldahldesign]

I'm finding it incredibly confusing and surprising that I can't create some kind of label or text box in my plan that will add up all of the living area from all floors of my project and dynamically display it for me. I've tried so many macro tutorials, chatGPT methods, and workarounds and I can't get anything to work. Where I'm often designing with tight square footage boundaries I need to stay within, it would be tremendously helpful to have a label like this that can track the changes I'm making and give me updated square footage numbers. Is this just not possible? Am I stuck forever doing this manually on my calculator as I switch from floor to floor?

 

I'm working on Chief Architect Premiere X17. Any tips would be appreciated!

[Rpadge]

You can draw polylines for your areas and then use a custom schedule that adds up the areas, that will give you a lot of control over what is calculated, (heated vs. non-heated, patios, decks, etc.) I agree that it seems like it should easier to automatically calculate living spaces.

 

[SHCanada2]

you can use schedules to sum up the room areas and it is dynamic

 

If you want to exclude certain types of rooms, then you need to add a new item in the object information panel, and add in a macro to include or exclude the room. (...edit: if you want to use the built in CA radio button of include or exclude in living area in the room properties)

 

There is at least one post on the topic from last year or maybe the year before

 

AlaskanSon and Renerabbit both have it predone and sell it, I beleive, if you wanted to contact one of them to purchase

Edited 2 hours ago by SHCanada2

[para-CAD]

So back in 1989 through 1995 I exclusively framed houses within 150 miles of Houston Texas. Every single set of plans had a small text box on the very first page, cover sheet that had heated space first floor heated space second floor those two numbers added together and then all the unheated space listed as garage, covered porch and the like. 
 

We being lazy framers were caught up in the dollar per square foot game and we were able to look at the very first page and run a quick calculation from those numbers to let the builder know what it would cost for us to frame it. This was when I was a helper and this is how I saw it done.

 

As I moved on and ran my own show I started to study the plans from the roof down to the foundation and I was able to see where the choke points were and add additional pricing to cover the time. I was no longer a flat rate dollar per square foot Framer.

 

If they were putting these kinds of numbers on the cover sheet back then, there’s no excuse for that not to be automated and available without having to buy a macro from someone.

 

I respect and admire the guys that can write macros but some of this stuff should be default in chief itself. 
 

I dictated this without proofreading so there may be some confusion

[Chrisb222]

20 hours ago, hyldahldesign said:

some kind of label or text box in my plan that will add up all of the living area from all floors of my project and dynamically display it for me

 

As Jason said, a Room Finish or a Custom Schedule will do this. And you can use reference display to show it on every floor if desired. Send it to layout.

 

You can exclude rooms individually by unchecking Include in Schedule in the room's specification dialog, or by unchecking the individual Room in the schedule dialog. You can also restrict rooms by Type in the schedule dialog. Show by single floor or all floors.

 

Pretty flexible out of the box, dynamically updates while drawing, but I don't know of any way to combine all heated rooms into a single report without displaying them all individually. You could get creative and crop out the rooms portion in layout if you really wanted to just show the heading and the totals.

 

Here's a dumb little example from X17 Residential Template using two schedules:

 

 

[Joe_Carrick]

Here's my Scope of Work

It's a Rich Text Box with 3 Schedules (one for each Floor).  This is on my Title Sheet.  It should give you an idea of what is needed.  The Total Living Area is a manual sum of the individual Schedules Living Area columns, but could be calculated in a custom macro.

Edited 12 hours ago by Joe_Carrick

[SHCanada2]

here is a simple example:

...but the trick is what to do when you want to exclude certain rooms. If you have two rooms of the same type of room, but you only want to exclude one, that is where it gets tricky. CA has a field on each room as to whether or not it is include or excluded in the living area. You can use this flag in a macro and set this property in a custom field in the object information panel, and then use this in the schedule, but there is some work to it. my macro has:

stdArea=standard_area

include=include_in_living_area

 

if (include == true)

      stdArea.to_f

else

         0

end

 

this effectively creates a new field to be used in the schedule instead of the std area i show in the video

 

 

 

Edited 3 hours ago by SHCanada2

[SHCanada2]

but that is not the only way. you could change the room type for any room you do not want to include, and not use that as the actual room name, and then exclude it from the schedule, or in the room specification ->include in schedule you could set the rooms you dont want to include to a different category, and then not include in the schedule. for instance go into the room and change the include in schedule from rooms to 3D solid. The schedule I just created will then exclude that room, or just exclude from the schedule altogether. or create a new category called "unconditioned" and create a new schedule with only rooms that have that category. Lots of different options

 

The only other thing you need to do if you want multiple totals is create individual schedules and then stack them on top of each other

Edited 2 hours ago by SHCanada2

[SHCanada2]

18 hours ago, para-CAD said:

So back in 1989 through 1995 I exclusively framed houses within 150 miles of Houston Texas. Every single set of plans had a small text box on the very first page, cover sheet that had heated space first floor heated space second floor those two numbers added together and then all the unheated space listed as garage, covered porch and the like.

here it is even simpler for the past 25 years. main floor, second floor, foundation optional

 

if there is a reno in the basement, then "finished area" which is usually total less utility room. So i have for my template 2 different ones to pick from plus parcel coverage if needed