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 — 13 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.

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 export grid

The Exports tab (and the "Take it to the workshop" cards) turns the layout into paper you can actually build from — nine exports, each its own deliverable:

Build pack is the whole build as one printed document: cover page with the spec card, the 1:20 floor plan and side elevation, the grouped cut list, a priced shopping list (including shell build-up, systems, and openings), the power summary, the wiring and water pages when you have circuits or fixtures, and a heaviest-first weight budget.

Plan sheets prints dimensioned drawings at 1:20 scale — a floor plan and a side elevation with a measurements legend, the reference you pin to the garage wall while you build.

Weighbridge report is a printable payload and axle-load summary — vehicle data, EN 1646-2 payload compliance, the added-load axle split and centre-of-mass, a heaviest-first table, and fill-in blanks for the real plate values once you've weighed the van — the document you bring to a weighbridge or an inspection.

Wiring diagram draws a 12 V ladder from what you placed: the battery as the hub, one circuit per power-drawing item, solar and shore charging sources, with a suggested cable gauge and fuse per circuit — sized from the cable runs you routed, or a straight-line estimate when you didn't. Verify against your components' manuals before buying.

Water schematic does the same for plumbing: fresh tanks as the source, the pump, a cold (and hot, if a water heater is placed) branch to every sink, tap, shower and toilet, drains, and the fresh-water days estimate — and it tells you when a pump or a grey tank is missing.

Build order generates the phase checklist for *this* layout — strip & prep, cutouts, runs & first fix, insulation, battens & subfloor, panels, floor, furniture, electrical and plumbing second fix, gas & safety, final fit & weigh — only the phases your build needs, each with its tasks and a shopping subset priced for that phase.

Wall template 1:1 prints the van wall's real curve at full scale across multiple pages — tape them together, cut along the line, and scribe cabinet sides and panels 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.

Cut list CSV gives you the raw rows — pieces, dimensions, weight, cost — for the timber yard or your own spreadsheet.