How a general contractor uses LumberSet to price a bid from a lumber takeoff

You are a general contractor pricing a wood-framed house, and the lumber package is one of the largest material lines in the bid. Until someone counts it, that line is an allowance: a round number with your margin standing behind it. A lumber takeoff replaces the round number with a counted one. This article walks through how a general contractor uses LumberSet to get that takeoff, budget it, put it in front of the yards, and carry a yard's quote into the bid.

Sign up as a builder, no yard account needed

LumberSet has two kinds of workspace. A yard uploads drawings, prices the takeoff from its own catalog and sends a quote. A builder uploads the same drawings and gets the same reviewed takeoff, but prices it two ways instead: a budget estimate, and a request for quote to the yards it chooses. You sign up as a builder in the browser, on desktop, tablet or phone, with nothing to install and no yard involved. The first released takeoff is free, so start with a job you have already bid and compare the two counts.

Create a project for the job and upload every PDF the architect issued, the architectural sheets and the structural sheets. Every sheet is read into a building model, not only the floor plan, because the sections carry the wall heights, the framing plan carries the joist spans and the schedules carry the headers and hangers. The takeoff is then checked by a LumberSet reviewer, an estimator on our staff, who records each correction with a reason and the sheet it came from.

What a general contractor gets in the lumber takeoff

Every takeoff line shows two things a spreadsheet allowance never does: its arithmetic and its evidence. Take a floor. In this example the framing plan on S2.1 shows 2x10 joists at 16 inches on center spanning 13 feet 6 inches, along a floor 40 feet long. The line reads: layout ceil(480 / 16) + 1 = 31 joists, each 13'-6", packed into 14-foot stock because nothing shorter reaches, so 31 pieces of 2x10 at 14 feet net. With a 5 percent waste factor the order quantity is 33 (31 x 1.05 = 32.55, rounded up). Click the line and the evidence takes you to S2.1 and the region it was read from.

Net quantity and order quantity sit side by side on every line: net is what the drawings need, order is net plus waste, packed into stock lengths and rounded to sellable units. Hardware is itemized too. Joist hangers, hurricane ties, hold-downs and anchor bolts are read from the structural sheets and each gets its own line rather than being folded into a rate.

Each element carries a confidence, so start with the low ones. Drawings are never complete, and where they were unclear, say a wall height missing from a section or a header the schedule skips, you correct the element and every affected line recomputes at once. Corrections are free, and they stay on the record with the takeoff.

The budget estimate is a budget, never a quote

A builder has no catalog, so the takeoff is priced from LumberSet's reference price book: a maintained budget price for each material in a region. The result is a budget estimate, and the name is deliberate. It tells you the size of the package and whether the job is worth chasing. It is not a number to bid. Lumber prices differ by region and move by the week, and only the yard that delivers to the site can say what the package costs on the day you order. Use the budget to check the quotes that follow, and never bid the budget itself.

Send the request for quote to the yards you choose

When the takeoff is right, send it as a request for quote (an RFQ) to the yards you already buy from, or want to. You name each supplier by email, and a yard does not need to be on LumberSet to receive one. Each yard gets its own link, sees only its own request, and prices exactly the quantities you sent, because the RFQ is frozen at the revision it went out with. Replies come back side by side. No yard sees another's.

That is the point of the exercise. When each yard does its own count from the drawings, their quotes differ in quantity as much as in price, and you cannot tell whether the low one is sharper pricing or a lighter count. On identical quantities the comparison becomes what it should be: unit price, availability, delivery and service. Say three yards reply on the same list at $41,800, $40,250 and $43,100. The low one is not automatically the answer, but for the first time you know the spread is price and not the count.

Export, bid, and treat revised drawings as a change order

Export the takeoff as CSV for your own spreadsheet and as PDF for the bid file. The number that goes in the bid is the quote a yard has put its name to, with the takeoff behind it as the record of what that price covers. What a lumber takeoff should tell a general contractor lists five questions to ask before you sign.

The architect will revise. When revised or additional sheets arrive after the takeoff was released, upload them as a change order on the same project. It runs as its own takeoff and shows what changed against the released one: lines added, lines removed, quantities changed. In this example the revision moves a window and adds a dropped beam: two lines added (the LVL and its posts), one removed, six changed. You send the changed takeoff to the same yards and re-price what moved, not the whole house, and the record of the change stays with the project for the conversation with the owner. A change order carries a change order fee of $100.

What it costs a general contractor

$200 per released takeoff, and the first is free. No monthly fee, no seat licenses, no contract, so the cost follows the number of jobs you bid. A takeoff is billed once, when it is released. Corrections, recomputes, re-sending an RFQ and re-exporting are free. Say you bid three houses in a month and one architect revises: the first takeoff is free, the next two are $400, the change order is $100, so the month costs $500 against three bids. The full table is on the pricing page. Your drawings are encrypted in transit and at rest, are never used to train models unless you opt in, and are never visible to another customer; the detail is on the security page.