BraveUserMike

Please

Hey y-g-m-n, Thank you for suggestions, I originally drew these plans in 2019 and i wasn’t at all concerned about the roofs at the time. In 22 I designed a kitchen remodel in them and still wasn’t worried about the roof. The staircase and stairwell were part of one of those efforts and I don’t even remember which. I’m trying to finish and correct the main house layout as part of the current effort and I’m definitely having problems with and around the stairs. There were stairs in the staircase from whenever I originally did the plans but I deleted them as part of the process of trying to get this area right. I’m not sure what walls I should be drawing before putting the stairs and what I should leave for the stairs to auto-generate. I’m not sure if I should build the stairs before the roof or vice versa. As built the 1st floor section of stairs and the landing are 42” side and the 2nd floor section of stairs is 40” wide. I’m not sure if I should be working with the as built dimensions or start with 42 and 42. The curved wall of the stairwell is some sort of concrete, definitely thinner than standard cbs walls of the 1st floor exterior but definitely concrete. It intersects the cbs wall of the front door, the exterior wall of the bedroom, and the the interior wall of the closet in that bedroom. The same upstairs. The exterior walls upstairs are stucco not cbs so the interior dimensions change. That obviously plays into the 40” wide steps on the 2nd floor vs 42 on the 1st floor and back to my question of do I design it as 42 and 42 or 42 and 40. The short wall that separates the planter from the porch buts up against and maybe commingles with the edge of the curved wall on the 1st floor A lot of things intersect here and the software is obviously not happy with it. The 1st floor section of the stairwell has a shed roof on it. I’m not sure if the software can handle having the curved all as a gable wall under a shed roof or not. Sometimes when I build the roof the joint between the curved wall and the front door wall gets pulled apart and a big chunk of the interior looses its room definition. I know I need to do something different but I have so many things I’m not certain about how they work coming together at the same time I don’t how to work the problem.

show off, lol I was up all night..... and I have.....

This is what it is supposed to be:

Okay, I stayed up all night certain that the next click would fix everything but that hasn't happened. I could use some guidance. Something in the area of the staircase is messing everything up. I've tried drawing the stair well on the 2nd floor with the ceiling height lowered. I've tried drawing the stair well only on the 1st floor with the ceiling heigh raised. I've tried about a million variations of wall specifications. I've tried adding breaks all kinds of places. I'm at a total loss. This is what I have now......

In real life the planter doesn't have a floor at any depth

I had to adjust the ceiling height to account to lowered stem wall top.

Maybe I'm just dense. I had already looked at the structure in the room dialog and it didn't make sense at first. I think I have it figured out now. This is slab on grade construction. There is no stem wall but I think what it's doing is calling the slab a 4" stem wall. So it won't let me change the height of the stem wall. So I think changing the stem wall top under absolute elevations equates to changing the grade under the slab. Putting -4" there worked. I think I have this set up in Jo Ann fashion now. I used two closed boxes to make the front of the planter and another to make the slab leading up to the porch/entry.

Hey Jo Ann, I'm trying Jo Ann I'm tryin Okay, so I deleted the half wall in the front which was defining my planter as a room. Now the slab for the porch/patio/entry is extending all the way across despite my leaving the half wall in between. While we're talking about it...I actually need to lower the porch/patio/entry floor. The chattahoochee is 4.75" lower than the porcelain tile of my main floor.

I'd be willing to purchase the current version of HomeDesigner Architect but it doesn't look like that would be much better. It seems like you really need Pro to avoid these hassels. I found shapes in the library and that proved a much cleaner solution. I still had to pull all three walls back from their intersection for the software to let me put the box there but after I placed the box I was able to put the walls back together inside of it.

Oh, I am. Doing a search in help for column brings up results talking about making selections in the display column, nothing about structural columns. Same thing in the user guide. Almost the same thing in the reference guide. In the reference guide there is one reference to columns in the millwork library. No explanation is given about how to use said library object. If there is any explanation about how non wall objects are incorporated into walls I've failed to find it and I'm looking. None of the columns in the library resemble my column but I'll go play with one anyway and see if I can't figure out how they work. It's hard to believe this isn't documented. This must be done fairly regularly. Have HomeDesigner suite users had to give up using columns? How am I going to add the pole barn I'm planning after this?

Hello, Thank you for your response. I think what you are saying is it can't be done. It sounds like you are describing making something that visually looks like a 16x16 poured column. I was afraid that would be the answer. I was hoping there was a way to draw structural columns so they show on the plans like they would on a stamped set of plans and add the correct materials to the materials list. I don't actually know what a 16x16 steel reinforced column looks like on a stamped set of plans but I was hoping the software did. This column is actually probably block. There are some decorative stucco elements on the front of this house but this column isn't one of them. You can easily hear the difference between stucco over concrete and decorative stucco wrappings. Now that I'm attending to just this column and not the overall exterior, I just remeasured and it's 16.5"-16.75" that matches block with stucco. As far as getting it to line up the column with the half walls and the room divider the tiny room method you described worked best. I'm afraid of what happens when I build the roof.

I've already created half walls to enclose the planter and enclosed the front porch with a room divider. This probably isn't the right way to lower the height of the front porch slab but it's all I could figure out.

I have a 16”x16” poured concrete column in the structure of my house. I’m recreating the plan for my house in HomeDesigner Suite 2019. What’s the correct way to create this column in the plan?

Thanks, I checked already though. There was nothing useful. There was something from 24th and something from the 26..nothing from the 25th. I opened each to make sure and the rotation wasn’t in either of them. I just restarted from where I began on the 24th, deleted the 2nd floor, used edit area selecting everything and rotated. I’m double checking the all the measurements on the 1st floor before building the 2nd floor this time. There was something off in the area of the stair well.

I’m not sure how much help a picture from the front will be….

Keith’s suggestion worked. There are plenty of other roof parts that still need tinkering after I get the main room to be a room again but I’ll tinker at it on my own unless/until I get stuck again. I know I’m going to need help figuring out how to put roof over no walls but I’ll start a new thread for that.

I just drew a new wall over it. Now I need to figure out how to make the main part of my first floor a room again. I’m getting there. Thank you for your help. Much appreciated!

I've gotten pretty close to getting the 2nd floor edited back together after turning off object snaps and moving the section that didn't rotate one way and then another. I had to delete the (I guess now west) wall of the bedroom for it to let me slide the rooms into the right spot but now I get a warning if I try to pull the auto generated wall to replace the deleted wall.

Keith, thank you! I could swear that there was a pre-existing break in that wall and I had tried that before but.... I copied the plan file without closing or saving the open version I had been experimenting on most recently. When I opened that plan that whole north wall on the 1st floor was one wall. I inserted a break in it, just guestimating about where, set it to hip and it worked. It still shows auto generated walls over the garage on the 2nd floor plan. That's not right, right?

Keith, with the roof over this room turned off on the garage room this is what happens

It was 2019ish when I did the layout. I've forgotten a lot. It looks like it may be impossible to rotate everything into the requested orientation in one shot with the version of software I have. I have area edit. I do not have area edit all floors. Whether I use area edit or drag a selection box around everything while viewing the 1st floor it rotates the imported survey and 1st floor plan only. The 2nd floor auto generates some walls over the 1st floor in its new location but most of the 2nd floor, presumably anchored by what I had to draw manually stays put. It's been a long time since I did the 2nd floor layout but I think I vaguely recall putting a lot of effort into getting the curved staircase wall correct.

Hello, I was in the process of editing the original post with the software version as you were posting. I'm using HomeDesigner Suite 2019. I bought the software back then to design a kitchen remodel. I did the floor layout then but didn't bother with fixing the roofs. Now I'm designing a garage along the north property line. The new garage will have a hip roof. I'm going to fill the space between the north wall of the house and the new garage with a concrete pad covered probably by scissor trusses on columns for boat parking with roof coming off the north side of that to the angled wall on the new garage and roof coming off the side nearest the house over to the side entry door on the house. I need to get the roofs right on the house before I get into figuring out how to do the roofs on the pole barn/boat bar/car port/covered walkway section.