Measure on plans and Read plans and propose rooms and counts cover drawing and proposing. This page covers what changes once a length or a room needs to account for a door, a window or a whole page at once: openings, the finishes that read around them, plotting rooms and walls together, and the drawer's new life as a layer panel.
Openings on a length or a room
A door, a window or a cased opening is recorded on the length or the room it sits on, never subtracted from the shape you drew. With a row selected, press O and click on its run, or open the row menu and choose Add opening. A length that carries one now reads three numbers: gross, openings and net. A 40 foot wall with a 3 foot door and a 3 foot window, for example, reads gross 40'-0", openings 6'-0", net 34'-0".
Each kind opens with sensible defaults you can edit: a door is 3'-0" by 6'-8", cased both sides; a window is 3'-0" by 4'-0", cased one side; a cased opening is 4'-0" by 6'-8", cased both sides. Leave the height blank for an opening that runs the full height of the wall. A count can never carry an opening; openings only make sense on something with a length.
Net bases for finishes
Three new bases read the openings you have recorded: Wall area less openings, Perimeter less door openings, and Casing from openings. The existing Wall area and Perimeter bases are unchanged, so a spec item you already applied keeps the number it has. When a linked room has openings that an item's basis does not deduct, its takeoff disclosure adds a hint, for example "This room has 2 openings that this basis does not deduct.", with a link that switches the basis. Switching a basis only changes a draft; nothing on the spec sheet moves until you press Apply, and no dollar figure is ever touched here.
Crown reads the full perimeter, because crown runs above every door. Base and shoe read the net perimeter, because they stop at every one. A 12 by 14 foot room with a 9 foot ceiling, one door and one window reads a gross wall area of 468 square feet against a net of 436, a perimeter of 52 feet against a net of 49, and a casing run, the trim around both openings, of just under 44 linear feet. New presets read these bases directly: Drywall and Baseboard and shoe read the net numbers, Crown reads the full perimeter, and Casing reads the openings themselves. On that net wall area, Drywall rounds up to 15 sheets after its waste factor.
A room's openings
A room carries its own openings too, added on the Rooms page beside its ceiling height. Make room copies a measurement's openings onto the room it creates, so a wall you already measured with its door and window does not need re-entering.
Plot all rooms, plot all walls
AI assist can now propose a whole page at once instead of one room or one wall at a time. Plot all rooms and Plot all walls each offer a free detect pass and a metered Ask AI pass. Either way, every result lands as a set of proposals reviewed together on one batch screen, where you can rename, recolour, and link each one to a room before confirming the whole batch with a single press. Detect on the walls path finds the door gaps it can see in a traced wall, and says so plainly: "Detect finds door gaps in the walls it traced. Windows sit inside the wall line, so add them by hand or ask AI." Plot all only ever creates proposals, and confirmed rooms and measurements once you approve them; it never sets a quantity or a price.
The six separation types
When AI assist proposes walls, it splits a room's outline using one of six separation types, Houzz's own names: No Separation, Door Centerline, Window Centerline, Door and Window, Door and Junction, and Door Window and Junction. A centerline type cuts a wall run at the middle of every matching opening; a junction type also cuts at every corner. Where a split cuts through a door, the door lands on both resulting pieces at half its width, so the two net lengths still add up to the same total the uncut wall would have read.
Name it as you draw it
Draw an area by hand and, once, you are asked what it is: Name this room, Link to a room, or Skip. The name field is prefilled from a matching label on the sheet and marked "Suggested from the sheet" until you change it. Skip leaves an ordinary measurement, which is the right choice for a roof plane or a slab that is not a room. A link at the bottom of the dialog, "Don't ask for" followed by the group's name, turns the question off for every area you draw into that group from then on. Plotting a whole page never triggers this dialog; a batch is reviewed on its own screen instead.
Layers: the drawer becomes the layer panel
The Measurements drawer is now also where you control what is visible: category, then group, then row, the same tree you already total by. Click a group and two things happen at once: new shapes you draw land in it, and the canvas shows only its shapes, dimming everything else. A banner across the top names what you are looking at and adds, "Totals still count every visible layer.", because looking at one layer never changes what the summary, the CSV or the PDF add up. Show all brings everything back into view.
This is different from hiding a layer with its eye, which does change the numbers: a hidden group or row drops out of every total, the CSV and the marked-up PDF, exactly as it does today.
A handful of keys make this quick once your hands are on the plan: I isolates the selected row's group, Shift+I isolates its whole category, Shift+S shows everything again, Shift+H hides every visible layer, H hides just the rows you have selected, and 1, 2 and 3 toggle areas, lengths and counts.
A colour per measurement
Any row can carry its own colour from the same swatch the group already offers. A row with no colour of its own draws in its group's colour, so recoloring twelve rooms drawn into one group is as simple as giving each row its own swatch.
AI is here to assist you and is not a substitute for your judgment. Check your work and make sure every material is accounted for.