The Build Sheet

From layout to numbers

Everything you place carries data — weight, cost, power draw, dimensions — and the Build Sheet rolls it all up into the numbers that decide whether a build works: what it costs, what it weighs, and what to buy. Open it with the Build Sheet button in the toolbar.

It opens on a spec card: your van and its interior dimensions, the item count, a top-view silhouette of the build, and four gauges — Build weight against the payload, Build cost with the yearly fuel figure, Power autonomy in days, and Fresh water on board. Five tabs sit underneath: Overview (where the money goes, heaviest on board), Shopping (the priced materials list), Cut list, Systems & gear (power system, sizer, packed gear) and Exports.

Materials estimate

The materials table is your shopping list: 2×2 stud lumber (total meters, converted into 2.4 m lengths including waste), plywood sheets for boards and panels, plus cable and water pipe from your routed runs (including slack). Each line has an editable unit price — set your local timber-yard and hardware prices and the totals reprice instantly. Prices are saved with the project.

Furniture counts here too: every cabinet, kitchen unit, bench, and bed platform is priced as the sheet and stud stock you'd cut it from, sized parametrically from the item's live dimensions. The item's own cost row then covers hardware & fittings — hinges, runners, and the bought parts.

So does the shell build-up you spec in the Van inspector (opened from the Body button): floor and wall/ceiling insulation appear as square metres at your chosen thickness including each material's cutting waste (rigid boards waste more than wool), battens as metres of stud, and subfloor and lining panels as sheet counts. Areas come from your van's real interior with every window and fan cutout subtracted.

Power system

The Power system section balances your electrical budget: enter your battery capacity (Ah @ 12V) and solar wattage, and it compares them against the daily draw of your placed appliances — the fridge and roof fan have sensible defaults, and every item's Wh/day is editable in the Inspector.

You get the verdict in one line: total consumption, expected solar yield (at 3.5 sun-hours), the daily surplus or deficit, and how many days the battery lasts without sun.

Two things make the figures honest. First, placed hardware wins over typed numbers: put a battery or solar panels from the catalog into the layout and the Ah and W fields switch to reading from them (remove the items to type again). Second, the Chemistry selector — LiFePO4 (80 % usable), AGM or lead-acid (50 %) — sets how much of the bank you can actually draw, so an AGM build no longer gets lithium autonomy. The System sizer beside it turns your daily draw into a shopping spec: pick the days without sun you want and your largest 230 V load, and it recommends the battery bank, solar array (with the winter figure alongside), inverter, MPPT controller, DC-DC and shore chargers — each marked Covered or Short against what you've placed.

Below it, a heat-loss line sizes your heater: at −5 °C outside and 20 °C inside, it works out the watts your shell loses — from the insulation materials and thicknesses you spec'd in the Van inspector, across your van's real surface areas — and names the heater class (2, 4, or 6 kW) that covers it. Insulate better and watch the number fall.

Running costs & payload

Running costs prices the weight you're bolting in: build weight adds roughly 0.4 L/100km per 100 kg, and with your fuel price, base consumption, and yearly driving (all editable) it shows the extra liters and the annual cost of hauling your build around.

Payload lives where you need it constantly: the build stats panel in the bottom-left of the editor shows total weight against the van's payload as a live bar — green, amber past 80%, red when you're over — plus the front/rear axle split, left/right balance, water on board, floor usage, and the design checks that flag risky layouts.

The design checks go beyond weight — some two dozen heuristic checks that lint the layout for livability: a warning when there's less than 55 cm of sit-up clearance over the sleeping surface, an aisle-pinch warning where facing furniture leaves less than the 45 cm you need to walk through at hip height, a tip when the shower is too tight for elbow room, plus checks for a missing or too-short bed, gas bottles near heat, heavy items mounted high, roof overload, blocked doors and the sliding-door entry, missing ventilation, side-heavy loading, and a floor that's gotten too tight to walk. Gear outside the body has its own: too much weight hanging behind the rear axle, roof gear that takes the van over a height bar it used to clear, heavy freely placed parts outside the body, and — for tanks or a heater under the floor — ground clearance, fit between the chassis rails, frost and exhaust routing.

The cut list

Below the summaries, the sheet lists every piece to cut, grouped into four tables: Lumber cuts (framing exploded stud-by-stud — a frame built with the designer's Frame convert shows up as its individual studs and rails), Panels (sheet-good pieces with dimensions), Hardware (hinges, drawer runners, and fittings with counts), and Fixtures (bought items with weight and cost).

Furniture is buildable, not a black box: a cabinet explodes into its 18 mm carcass sides, top, and bottom, a 6 mm back, and doors with hinge counts; a drawer unit lists each drawer box with its runner pair; a kitchen block includes the worktop, plinth, and mid divider; a bed platform breaks into rails, cross members, and the deck. Every panel is sized from the item's live dimensions — resize the cabinet and its cut list follows.

1. Press Build Sheet in the toolbar.
2. Review the tables — each row shows the piece, quantity, dimensions, and weight.
3. Press Copy CSV to paste the sheet into a spreadsheet, or Download to save it as a CSV file named after your project.
4. Take it to the timber yard — the lumber line already includes waste.

Take it to the workshop: the Build Pack

The Exports tab is the Build Pack composer: one document for the whole build, put together from the sections you tick. Start with who it is For — Me (shopping list, cut list and the cabinet sheets), Carpenter / CNC (cabinet sheets, cut list, sheet layout and piece labels), Electrician / plumber (wiring, water, build order and weight) or Everything — then adjust the Sections yourself: Cover, Plan sheets 1:20, Cabinet sheets, Cut list, Sheet layout, Shopping list, Wiring diagram, Water schematic, Build order, Weight report and Piece labels. Every row shows a live count — "5 items", "48 pieces", "4 sheets" — so the pack reads as a receipt before you print it.

Set the Scope to the Whole build or to your current Selection — pick one cabinet and its group comes along, which is how you send a joiner a single unit. Choose the Sheet stock you will actually buy (2440×1220, 2500×1250, 1525×1525 or 4×8 ft) and the Saw kerf; both feed the sheet layout. The Preview shows every page as it will print — page through it, and the counts and the number of sheets to buy update as you toggle sections.

Cabinet sheets are the pages a carpenter quotes from. Each buildable item gets its own sheet: overall size and where it sits (from the rear, from the left, off the floor), a front elevation with the door and drawer bays plus a side view, then every panel drawn to scale with finished dimensions — a heavy line marks a visible edge to band or plane, dashed lines locate a cutout from the edges, an arrow shows the grain — followed by the lumber bars and the hardware to buy. Pieces are numbered "3.2": the item's number on the plan sheet, then the piece.

The pieces are honest about what is on them. A sink, hob or tap standing on a worktop becomes a hole in that worktop piece; overhead-locker sides carry the wall's scribe profile; designed and AI parts explode too — thin boxes become sheet panels with their holes as cutouts, long boxes become lumber, everything else is a bought part. Tables, fold-down tables, wall shelves, step boxes and extending beds explode alongside the cabinets, beds and kitchens.

Sheet layout answers the question the cut list alone never did: how many sheets to buy. Panels are packed onto your stock sheet with the kerf and the grain respected, per material — "Buy 4 sheets of 18 mm" — with a diagram per sheet in cutting order and the offcuts worth keeping; lumber is packed into stock lengths the same way.

Three downloads and Print sit under the preview. Download PDF writes a real vector PDF in your browser — small, searchable, crisp at any scale. Shop files (.zip) is for a CNC shop or a cut-to-size counter: one DXF per piece and per nested sheet at 1:1 in millimetres (outlines, cutouts, labels and grain on their own layers), import files for Cutlist Optimizer and OptiCutter, a plain cut-list CSV with edges and cutouts, and a lumber list. Labels PDF prints a sticker per piece on an Avery L7160 sheet — stick each one on as it comes off the saw; the id matches the cabinet sheet and the cut list.

You don't have to open the composer for a single unit: any buildable item shows a Cabinet sheet (PDF) button at the bottom of the Inspector that downloads that item alone — drawing, pieces, sheet layout and hardware — ready to hand to a joiner.

Below the composer, the remaining exports stay as they were: Wall template 1:1 prints the van wall's real curve at full scale across multiple pages — tape them together and scribe cabinet sides against the actual curvature before you cut expensive plywood; AR Quick Look puts the build life-size in your driveway through your phone (Quick Look on iPhone, a glTF file everywhere else); and Copy CSV / Download CSV give you the raw cut-list rows for the timber yard or your own spreadsheet.

Build health: fix, decide, check

The Build stats card carries one advice list for the whole plan, sorted into three tiers. Fix — wrong or unsafe right now: a blocked sliding door, a gas bottle beside the hob, a locker floating with nothing under it. Decide — a decision this plan has not made yet: no pump for the tank, no charge source for the battery, no roof vent, no CO alarm. Check — things only you can answer, usually away from the screen: weigh the van, confirm the plate figures. The three counts sit in the card, the first three rows are always visible, and Show all opens the rest.

Each row is one short line; press its chevron to read why it matters and what to do. Rows about decisions can be dismissed for good — a dismissed prompt never comes back on that browser — while a live warning about the layout in front of you returns by itself until you fix it.

Some prompts are answered by placing the thing: a CO alarm, a smoke alarm, an extinguisher and a fire blanket are in the catalog, and the matching prompt clears the moment one is in the van. No prompt is a safety clearance — have gas, electrical and structural work checked by a qualified professional.