Painting takeoff software: wall and ceiling area by room

What a painting estimator takes off

Worked example: the walls of one office, on a real plan

Our room is TRICARE office 1A06 on drawing A2-2, the first-floor plan of Block 1A of a medical and dental clinic, from a public-domain U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plan set that ships as the demo set in TRACEBUILD. The drawing is metric, at 1:50.

1. Check the ceiling before you count it

The reflected ceiling plan for the same block, A17-1, shows office 1A06 with a lay-in acoustical grid ceiling. Lay-in tile ceilings are not painted, so this room has no ceiling paint. Where the RCP shows a gypsum board ceiling instead, the ceiling area equals the room's floor area; Detect Spaces measured this office's floor at 9.18 m² (98.8 SF), so that is the number you would use.

2. Measure the wall run and enter the height

We drew the Wall tool around the inside faces of the office walls and closed the loop: 12.47 m of wall. TRACEBUILD then asks for a height. The demo set leaves out the wall sections and the room finish schedule that give the ceiling height, so for this example we entered 2.7 m (about 8 ft 10 in) and say so; on a real bid, take the height from the sections or the RCP.

3. Subtract the openings

The office has one door and one exterior window. We listed them as deductions: the door at 910 × 2100 mm, using the 0.91 m opening Detect Spaces reported for the office doors and an assumed 2.1 m door height, and the window at 1000 × 1200 mm, using the 1000 mm rough-opening width dimensioned on the plan next to window tag W1 and an assumed 1.2 m height. The door and window schedules would give you exact sizes.

Results

4. From area to gallons

The paint schedule tells you the system and number of coats. Two coats on 328.9 SF is 657.8 SF of coating. Divide by the spread rate on the product data sheet. For example, if the data sheet gives 400 SF per gallon per coat, that is 657.8 ÷ 400 = 1.6 gallons, so you would buy 2. The spread rate is the product's number, not ours; use the one for the product and surface you are pricing.

Download the export: tracebuild-example-painting-a2-2-office-1a06.xlsx. The wall shows its net area, and the office floor area is included for ceiling work.

Scaling up to a whole floor

Room by room works for a suite; for a floor, use Trace Walls. It traces the wall linework and classes each wall, and Measure ▸ Set wall height gives every traced wall a height at once, which turns the lengths into wall area. Two cautions from our takeoff guide example: a partition between two rooms is traced once but painted on both faces, and one traced run on that sheet was placed in the wrong wall class and needed reclassing. Wall tracing accuracy is measured in our published wall-detection benchmark; the height always comes from you.

Keep one item name per paint system, such as "Paint, eggshell, offices" and "Paint, epoxy, wet areas". The export totals each item separately, so each system can take its own spread rate, number of coats and labor rate in your pricing sheet, and a revised drawing re-exports into the same rows.

The same calculation in feet

Take the 12 by 14 ft room from the answer above, with 9 ft ceilings, one 3 by 7 ft door and one 4 by 4 ft window. The walls run 52 LF, so the gross wall area is 468 SF; the openings are 21 SF and 16 SF, leaving 431 SF of net wall to paint.

The 400 SF per gallon is only an example spread rate; use the figure on the data sheet for your product and surface. In TRACEBUILD the same room is one Wall run with a 9 ft height and two deduction lines, "1 x 3'-0" x 7'-0"" and "1 x 4'-0" x 4'-0"", and the net area appears on the sheet and in the export.

Painting takeoff pitfalls

1. No ceiling height. A floor plan gives lengths only. Get heights from the sections, the RCP or the finish schedule, room by room if they vary.
2. Painting lay-in ceilings. Check the RCP; acoustical tile grids are not painted, gypsum ceilings are.
3. One face of a partition. A wall between two painted rooms has two faces. Room-by-room takeoff catches both automatically; wall-by-wall takeoff does not.
4. An unclear deduction rule. Decide which openings you deduct, often only those above a minimum size, and apply it the same way everywhere.
5. Mixing systems. Wet areas, epoxy and high-performance coatings are priced differently. Keep each system as its own item.
6. Doors and frames forgotten. Count them from the door schedule, by type and finish.
7. Height drives labor. Walls over a ladder's reach need lifts or scaffolding. Flag high walls as their own item.
8. Primer on new work. New gypsum board usually gets a primer coat before the finish coats. Check the paint schedule and count primer as its own coat and its own product.
9. Exterior work hiding on the elevations. Exterior walls, soffits, railings and doors are measured from the elevations, not the floor plan. Take them off as a separate section so interior and exterior can be priced and scheduled apart.

What TRACEBUILD does not do for painting yet

It does not read ceiling heights from the drawings; you enter the height. It does not convert area to gallons or price labor: estimating is part of TRACEBUILD Pro, the Windows app, which is coming soon. For now the areas go to Excel, where a spread rate and a labor rate finish the job. The construction takeoff template has a painting tab with coats and waste columns.

Other trades

Finishes: Flooring takeoff softwareDrywall takeoff software
MEP: Plumbing takeoff softwareElectrical takeoff softwareHVAC takeoff software
Structure: Concrete takeoff softwareMasonry takeoff softwareSteel takeoff software
Exterior and site: Roofing takeoff softwareSitework takeoff software