One of my upcoming jobs is likely to be adding exterior wall insulation of most of the house. However, rather than replicating the existing render finish on top of it, the plan is to go for a more traditional looking planked finish. (Using a semi synthetic (non flammable!) cladding product rather than traditional timber).
So one of the "design" phases was to estimate what quantity of material needed. That lead to a sketchup model with enough detail that I could see the lengths of everything, thence into a spreadsheet to start doing some sums...
Some bits were easy enough, but then you come to things like the trims needed at corners and around windows and doors. Lots of different lengths will be required, and no (or minimal) joins. However the stuff comes in 3m lengths. Realisation soon comes that with some optimised cutting, one could probably get away buying fewer of (the fairly pricey) lengths of trim. So I tried a couple of web based cutting optimisers, and ran into a couple of limitations and bits that were not quite what I wanted. So I thought why not DIY?
So, some scripting later, and my spreadsheet now does cut list optimisation. Then the feature creep starts... So I can do lengths of stuff, would it not be easy enough to do a rectangular area to work out the cuts and quantities for cladding? Ok not too difficult... now what about gables, they are not usually rectangular! So added those and some other bells and whistles.
If anyone wants to follow along, here is what you would need to do it: