Case Study — Painting & Coatings
$2.6M Paint Takeoff in Under 45 Minutes
Founded in 1972, Turman Commercial Painters bids commercial painting and coatings out of twelve offices in seven states. Jim Staggs leads estimating from Parker, Colorado, over seven full-time takeoff estimators and about a dozen more who take off jobs between project management and sales work. He is in his 46th year in the trade, has trained sixty to seventy estimators, and has used On-Screen Takeoff for decades throughout his career.
- Paint quantities are never one number. Every interior wall has two faces, often at different heights and with different finishes. Some ceilings are painted. Some are acoustical tile. Some are gypsum board. Some are exposed structure and should not be included in the paint scope.
- Turnaround determines opportunity. Seven full-time takeoff estimators carry 45 to 60 bids a month for a twelve-office contractor, and more invitations arrive than they can physically work on. Turnaround, not headcount, decides how much of that list they get to.
- Repetitive work consumes time. A 15-building apartment complex can include multiple building footprints and repeated unit types. Before pricing begins, estimators may spend hours setting up and tracing the same Conditions across floors and buildings.
- Complex work creates a different risk. A tenant improvement may include acoustical, exposed-structure, and gypsum ceilings, numerous soffits, changing wall heights, openings, and existing conditions. For a painter, every one of those differences is a different price.
Auto Takeoff, part of the Takeoff BOOST™ suite in On-Screen Takeoff®, was built and tuned for drywall and painting workflows first. It gives Jim a structured first pass to review, so he can spend less time tracing and more time validating scope and pricing the work.
- Both sides of interior walls. It generates paint wall linears for both wall faces. When recognizable finish information is available, those faces can be assigned to separate Conditions.
- Ceilings separated by type. It separates gypsum board from acoustical ceiling tile and can distinguish other ceiling types when the plan provides the information needed.
- Heights identified from the drawing. It picks up height callouts on reflected ceiling plans and applies a default height when no callout is available. Jim reviews and adjusts Conditions when heights vary.
- Repeated units carried forward. Jim can take off representative floors or building footprints, then copy and paste the results across repeated areas.
- Doors and windows counted and located. It detects doors, double doors, and windows and reports where they sit on the sheet. No clicking through symbols one at a time.
The clearest example came from a large Oregon apartment project with 15 buildings, three building footprints, and six unit types. One building type was four floors. The other two were three floors each. On a project like that, none of the measuring starts until the setup is done.
"By the time I go through the painstaking task of building that matrix in the background, Auto Takeoff can take off the whole entire interior of that project in minutes."
So Jim skipped it. He measured one floor for each building type using Auto Takeoff, and then copied the results where they repeated.
“I took off three buildings and I was done. Then it just became copy and paste from there. Taking off all those units without Auto Takeoff would take me ten times as long.”
The full interior takeoff was completed in less than 45 minutes. The project came out to approximately $2.6 million. Jim estimates that, with current improvements to Auto Takeoff, he could complete the same takeoff in less than 30 minutes today.
Jim’s second example was a 45,000- to 50,000-square-foot tenant improvement in Redmond, Washington. The plan included acoustical ceilings, exposed structure, gypsum ceilings, numerous soffits, and changing wall heights. Every one of those is a separate line item on a paint bid, and mixing them up is how you lose money on a job you already won.
Auto Takeoff separated them.
“I came in at nearly 100% accuracy with minimal adjustments.”
Auto Takeoff still depends on the plan set and requires estimator review. But the difference for Jim is meaningful: he starts with organized quantities instead of building every condition from scratch.
It was not always like this. Turman had two Takeoff BOOST licenses and rarely used them, because the first pass kept coming back wrong for paint. Then two things shipped: ceiling tags, and both faces of an interior wall taken off at their own heights.
“We had two Takeoff BOOST licenses and never really used them. Once ConstructConnect integrated the ceiling tags and the two-sided wall heights, that sold us.”
Jim gives the credit to the estimators who kept telling ConstructConnect what a paint takeoff actually needs.
Jim also noticed smaller improvements, including better recognition of walls around elevator and duct shafts and a clearer distinction between shower doors and regular walkthrough doors. For a painter, those details affect the quantities that reach the estimate.
- 30-60 minute takeoffs. A typical takeoff at Turman Commercial Painters dropped from a full day (5 to 8 hours) to 30 to 60 minutes with Takeoff Boost’s Auto Takeoff.
- About a day faster bid turnaround. Jim’s team gets bids out roughly a day sooner than before.
- 7-10 hours back every week. That’s a full workday, sometimes more, freed up for estimating instead of manual takeoff.
- +21% more bids a month. Estimating capacity climbed from 45 to 60 bids a month to 56 to 71 bids a month.
“It just gives me more time for more projects.”
For painting contractors, the value of AI is not removing the estimator from the process, but it’s helping move the estimator’s day forward. Takeoff BOOST’s Auto Takeoff handles repetitive measuring and organizing, while the estimator reviews wall faces, heights, finishes, ceilings, openings, and scope before final pricing.