Medeek Wall Review

(AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE: I really love this extension, so I reached out to developer and asked if he’d be interested in having me help promote the extension as an affiliate. If you decide to purchase using my discount code MASTERSKETCHUP, you’ll get 10% off and I’ll earn a small commission.)

Get 10% off Medeek Wall below

If you want to model wood-framed structures in SketchUp, the Medeek Wall extension can automate it for you! Create and edit complex wall assemblies, complete with studs, gypsum, sheathing, and siding with just a couple of clicks. Insert doors and windows, and the wall will be updated with the rough opening automatically. This powerful extension makes it feasible to fully coordinate the structural elements of a building right in SketchUp, without slowing you down.

Watch my review on YouTube, or continue reading below…

Why model this much detail?

What are the benefits of including this much detail in the model?

• Constructability – Design something that can actually be built, by thinking in terms of how the building is actually going to be put together, instead of using generic massing shapes that represent the walls. Increase the confidence in your design.
• Conflicts – Conflicts become obvious because you actually see them in the model, instead of assuming it can be worked out in the field.
• Coordination – Import 3D models from subcontractors and suppliers to see if they are coordinated properly with your model.
• Estimating/Takeoffs – With “every stud modeled”, you can export all the lengths and quantities of all the building materials and lumber using the native generate report feature, or the estimating module built into the Medeek Wall extension.
• Value Engineering – Since all materials are quantified, it’s much easier to make meaningful value engineering design decisions and immediate see their effect on costs.
• Structural design – Include all structural elements in the model, including shear walls, columns, posts, beams, and headers.
• Produce drawings – Bring the model into LayOut to create plans and elevations.

How Medeek Wall Works

After installing the extension, you’ll see several toolbars for creating/editing walls and creating/editing all sorts of doors/windows/posts/columns/beams/headers/blocking and more.

When you activate the wall tool, you configure the parameters of the wall from several input fields and drop-down menus, but you’ll quickly find yourself creating presets that you can load quickly so you don’t have to start from scratch every time.

With the wall parameters configured, you create walls by clicking on the start and end point of the wall. (The height is preconfigured in the wall parameters.) Just like most native SketchUp tools, you can use the arrow keys to lock inferences, and you can type in dimensions to define lengths.

What’s really cool is the studs at the wall corners actually configure themselves based on the orientation of the perpendicular wall. You can have it frame a California corner, solid corner, or many other configurations. Once walls are created, you can always go back and reconfigure the corner if you need to customize it.

In fact, you can update any wall property at any time after it’s drawn. It remains parametric. There are specialized tools for stretching, moving, joining, and splitting walls too. You can also use the Copy tool to copy one or more parameters to other walls. Btw, you can create gable walls and shed walls too! (More wall types are in development.)

Inserting Doors/Windows

Once a wall is created, use the door or window tool to insert openings. After configuring the opening or choosing from a preset, you can place the opening in the wall and the wall will be regenerated with the rough opening and header. Dedicated tools for moving, editing, and removing openings from walls makes it easy to edit the wall while retaining all parametric functionality of the extension.

My favorite features of doors/windows:

• Extremely customizable: There are so many different types of doors and windows you can create using the extension, including casings, glass grilles, transoms, sidelites, and more. If that’s not enough, you can even create your own custom doors/windows in your Medeek door/window library, and you’ll be able to use it in a Medeek wall.
• Accurate: It’s not just a generic representation of a door. You can actually include a rough opening that accounts for an offset to the door frame for shimming, so you get an actual, real-world rough opening just like you would when you go to install it.
• Opening width: When configuring openings, you define the width and height in the parameters ahead of time. This is great because you can save this door or window as a preset, and any time you need to insert that specific door or window, all you have to do is load the preset, then click on the center point of the opening on the wall (or you can toggle the anchor to the left or right of the opening).
• Custom headers: There’s an entire library of headers you can manage, and create your own. And after a simple feature request I made to the developer, he added the ability to insert flitch plates between headers! You can also define the number of jack and king studs used to support the header.

Structural wall elements

In addition to being able to add doors and windows to walls, there are several structural elements you can add to walls too.

• Posts/columns: For point loads, place posts in the wall. You can choose from a variety of lumber sizes, and it will automatically remove any studs from the wall that are in conflict with it. Freestanding columns can also be placed anywhere in the model.
• Shearwalls: A library of prefabricated Simpson Strong-Tie shear walls can be inserted into a wall, or custom shearwalls can be placed along any part of a wall. You can customize hold-downs, post type, and all sorts of other things.
• Beams: Place all types of beams in the model, from steel, lumber, timber, and engineered lumber.

Custom objects in walls

You do have the ability to automate blocking between studs, or even insert blocking manually, but one of my favorite (hidden) features about Medeek Wall, is the ability to associate custom objects with walls. By inserting an object inside a Medeek wall and including the word “custom” in the object name, it will remain in the wall even when the wall is regenerated, or if you add a door/window. Even cooler, you can use the word “subtract” to have a solid object cut away parts of the wall!

And btw, there’s also a stair tool which is pretty cool 🙂

Quantification and estimating

With all of this detail in your model, how do you extract that data? Medeek Wall has an included Estimating module, which is admittedly a work-in-progress, but it outputs a table of materials and quantities grouped by wall. From there, you can bring it into Excel and organize the data however you’d like.

The estimating module is definitely a work-in-progress. I’d like to see the ability to just spit out a total length of 2x4s, or a more advanced algorithm that understands standard lumber lengths and accounts for cutoffs and waste. So you can literally just provide your lumberyard with a total quantity of lumber to purchase. But it’s not quite there yet.

Summary

Overall, this extension is incredibly powerful as-is, and has an active developer behind it constantly pushing updates. But there are a few things missing that I hope to see added in the future.

I really wish it had the ability to control parameters globally, kind of like how you use components to edit multiple copies of an object. I want to have one place to define what kind of siding to use for the entire project, instead of having to update it individually for each wall. I also want to be able to define my own custom wall sandwich, to control the order and type of building material that makes up the wall.

But in its current state, this is a fantastic extension. I wouldn’t even consider modeling a building to this level of detail without it. If you’re looking at other framing extensions, like Framer for SketchUp or PlusSpec, Medeek Wall as a great value because it’s far superior than Framer for SketchUp, and far more affordable than PlusSpec.

And I didn’t even mention that there are additional extensions for foundations and trusses, that you can purchase separately, or as a bundle in the MdkBIM Suite.