Siding takeoff that
reads the elevations.

The squares are on the elevations, not the plan

Siding is a vertical trade, and that one fact trips up half the bids that come in wrong. You can't take it off the floor plan, because the floor plan has no height and no gables. The quantity lives on the elevations — four faces, each with its own openings to net out, its own wall height, and on most jobs a gable triangle or two stacked above the plate line. Read the elevations and you have the wall area. Net the windows and doors, add the gables, and you have net cladding area. Convert to squares and you have the number you actually order against.

Pilars works the elevations the way you would: it measures each face, subtracts every opening, picks up the gable geometry, and rolls the result into squares for the product you're quoting — lap, panel, shake, whatever the schedule calls. Then it does the tedious part: the trim, the corners, the starter strip, the J-channel and the flashing, all read off the same drawings and counted by the foot and the each. The eyeball-the-elevation-and-pad-it method becomes a real, reviewable list.

Where siding bids actually leak

Three places, and none of them are the big flat wall everyone measures fine. First, the gable triangles — they're real area sitting above the plate line, and bids that work off plan perimeter and a wall height miss them or guess them low. Second, the linear-foot accessories — inside and outside corners, trim, frieze, water table, starter and J-channel. That LF doesn't read as a rectangle, so estimators underbuy it, and on a cut-up elevation it adds up fast. Third, the details — weather barrier laps and coverage, window flashing kits, head and kickout flashing, and the Z-flashing and transition trim wherever two cladding types meet. Mixed cladding is its own trap: lap over a stone-veneer base, board-and-batten in the gables, panel on the rear — every transition line is a place where flashing and trim hide, and where a fast bid quietly leaves them out.

• Siding area by square, net of every opening, per elevation
• Gable triangles picked up from elevation geometry
• Trim, corners, frieze and starter counted as linear feet
• Weather barrier laps, window flashing kits and kickout flashing
• Mixed-cladding zones split out with their transition trim and Z-flashing

Squares vs. square feet, and what Pilars reads

One square equals 100 square feet of coverage — the unit you buy fiber cement, vinyl and most lap products in, the unit your supplier quotes in, and the unit your installed price per square is built on. Take off in square feet for accuracy, but quote and order in squares, and keep the conversion explicit so nobody is off by a factor of a hundred at PO time. Pilars carries both: net SF per elevation for the math, squares for the order, and a clear waste line so you can set your own factor by product and pattern instead of inheriting someone's default. It reads the elevations for area and openings, the wall sections and flashing details for the accessories, and the finish schedule for which product goes where — then hands you a takeoff organized by elevation and by cladding type, with the accessories and flashing attached to the wall they belong to.

The unit confusion is a real source of blown bids, not a pedantic point. A house with 2,800 net square feet of wall is 28 squares — but a fast bidder who quotes "28" while thinking square feet, or orders against squares while costing against square feet, is off by two orders of magnitude in one direction or the other. Keeping both numbers visible, side by side, with the conversion spelled out, is how you stop that mistake before it reaches the PO. Pilars does that on purpose: SF for the spreadsheet, squares for the supplier, and a waste line you control on top of both.

What lands on your desk

You get a siding takeoff organized by elevation and by cladding type, not a single blended area you have to break apart yourself. Each face carries its gross wall area, the openings netted out, the gables added, and a net coverage in both square feet and squares — so the math is transparent and the order quantity is one click away. The accessories ride along with the wall they belong to: corner LF on the corners, starter LF on the bottom course, trim and frieze where the elevation calls them, J-channel around the openings. Flashing comes as counts and lengths off the wall section — head flashing, kickout flashing, drip edge, and the window flashing kits as an each-count tied to the opening schedule. Weather barrier comes by area with a lap allowance you can set, because the coverage off the roll is never the coverage on the wall.

Waste is its own line, not a number baked into the area where you can't see it. Lap siding on a tall, cut-up elevation wastes differently than panel on a clean rectangle, and a vertical board-and-batten pattern wastes differently again — so Pilars carries the net quantity and lets you set the factor by product and pattern instead of inheriting a flat 10% on everything. That's the difference between an order that shows up right and a second delivery that eats your margin.

Every line points back to the elevation and the detail it came from, with a confidence score, so the review is a conversation you can win. Think a gable looks short? Open the line and see the geometry it measured. Think the rear elevation should be panel, not lap? Change the zone and the accessories re-resolve. The point isn't to replace your judgment on a mixed-cladding house — it's to do the four-elevation, net-every-window, count-every-corner grind in minutes so your judgment goes where it's worth something: the transitions, the flashing and the waste calls that actually move the number.

Questions estimators actually ask