447Debbie

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Everything posted by 447Debbie

  1. Is there a way to manually look for, and download, Home Designer Pro 2018 updates? Whenever the program asks me if I want to download an update I don't have time to do it (I have a slow connection). When I have time to do it, I don't get the message.
  2. Thanks. That worked. I started really messing with the roof, so if I end up with the walls not extending again, I'll send you the plan. For now, I switched to manual roof just to play with it for awhile but raising the roof off the top plate was something I can certainly do, now that I know about it. Thanks again.
  3. When I change a hip wall into a gable wall, the wall isn't reaching all the way to the roof. I suspect I did something when I was on the attic floor and deleted stuff I thought I didn't need. Any idea what I need to do to get the wall to build correctly? Secondary question: "How can I specify a raised heel truss?"
  4. I want to raise the garage. I thought you were setting my absolute elevations on the "subfloor height above terrain" to zero, see attached. Setting the stem wall top and the floor to 0", on the room specifications structure for the garage, did the trick. Thanks.
  5. I can't access the file you sent. I get the error message below. However, if I go with Absolute elevations to 0, that will mess up my topography since it doesn't start at zero. Sorry, there is a problem The page you are trying to access is not available for your account. Error code: 2C171/1
  6. Didn't work. No difference. The problem is that the house floor sits 12" up higher due to floor joists resting on the stem wall and the garage floor, or the slab, sitting below the top of the stem wall. I understand that, but I can't find a work around. Calling it a slab didn't work either. I know I'll have to have a slope from the back of the garage to the front, but the purposes of this exercise, I'd like to line up the garage floor with this red line.
  7. I'd like to edit my structure properties on my garage so that the garage floor is at the same height as the main floor of the house. Please tell me what heights I need to change, and to what I need to change them to, in the garage structure to make this happen. I've attached the specifications for both my main floor (left) and the garage (right). I prefer to change the garage specs to make this happen, and leave the main floor specs alone. I don't care if this takes to different foundation pouts, I just don't want any steps between the garage and the house. It seems like every change I have made just makes the garage foundation move lower, instead of higher.
  8. Does anybody know where I can find a list of differences between Home Designer Pro 2017 and Home Designer Pro 2018?
  9. Today I am trying to make a stairway with a landing then two more steps after the landing. Simple enough, got that done, had it automatically calculate the number of treads, done. Now, I want to make them 48" wide. I highlight the whole stair, the specification dialog comes up, I set stair one at 48", and stair 2 at 48", click ok and the ONLY stair that changes is the #1 AND....now the stairway is no longer one stair but is two separate stairs. I tried resizing the second stair by trying to grab the "size" displayed between < >, but as soon as I click on the size, it MOVES and won't allow me to even select it! I also cannot find a way to make the landing 48x48. I got close by dragging it, but could only get the one side at 47 15/16. The next move caused it to go to 48 1/16.
  10. Understood. It was a bad choice of words. I should have said "window spacing dimension" vs. "wall section's width".
  11. The only way I can figure to this is to drag the windows and in those cases, I don't have a fine enough resolution to get it down to 1/16 of an inch. It would be nice to type in the wall section's width, and then tell the program to freeze it so that it doesn't change when I go to the next section of the wall and change it. For me, typing in the length is more precise that trying to drag it.
  12. What's the trick to centering these four windows on this wall? Just for the sake of simplicity, let's assume the number needed for spacing is 25", that's probably not exact, but it's close. If I change one, it sets to 25". Then I change another to 25" and my first one moves. Is there an order of operations that must be followed?
  13. And don't make any mistakes, because if you do, you have to start all over. I did finally get it. Thank you. Still had some issues but I got it done.
  14. Last week I had problems with an island base cabinet. I finally got lucky on that one and got it the way I wanted it. Now, I'm having trouble with this computer desk. All I want to do is put a drawer at the top right, in place of the cutting board, while leaving the cutting board on the left side (cutting board is acting a keyboard drawer). I actually posted this to the technical support page because I don't understand this program's logic. I upgraded to 2017 because of issues with appliance cabinet design in 2016, where you couldn't freeze certain openings. I don't think the 2017 works for front designs on desks because I'm having a heck of time and cannot get this done. If there is a help topic that describes the order of these changes, please let me know where that help topic is. Also, if there is a video, let me know where it is. I cannot find anything that addresses the problems I am having. I'd really like to learn how to change widths and heights on individual sections as well. junk.plan
  15. Understood. I would never go out and say I need a 36" drawer. I just know the nominal of the cabinet is 36". On paper. Not real life. Once the place is built I planned to have the cabinetmaker do all the measuring. Here is my story about cabinets. I had what is my current kitchen all laid out on the drawings. The exterior door was to be x' y" from the cabinet wall, I don't remember the exact dimensions. I had the cabinets all drawn up, they rounded a corner, and I had lazy suzan corner base and wall cabinets with 45 deg fronts. Everything was symmetrical on the wall cabinets. As you know, it's not a simple feat to round a corner and get your sink centered between two wall cabinets that are the same size on each side of the sink. Single wall cabinets that open away from the sink so you can reach right in without having to reach around a door. Anyway, the framing crew was 4" off with the exterior door. They measured it from the wrong wall and left me 4" short for the cabinets. I had its datum (point from which it should be measured) from the cabinet wall, that was the important measurement, that's the measurement that was on the drawing. There was no measurement between the door center and the outside wall, unless you did the math to find the resultant dimension. But the resultant dimension wasn't the specified dimension. Whatever they did, they came up 4" short. Not a big deal, but they were And then there were the electricians that couldn't line up four can lights in a straight line, but I digress. I work in the aerospace industry so I understand measurements and calibrated tape measures (yes we have them). But, I'll never think I understand the mechanics of cabinet building enough to draw something up and specify a size. There are too many unknowns for me, stile/rail width, door width, reveal, etc. To get them all aesthetically correct, I'll leave that to the pros. Maybe when the time comes you can point me in the direction of a cabinet maker. I think I'll be ok having the doors and drawer boxes made elsewhere, as long as the cabinet maker specifies the sizes. As a matter of fact, every cabinet maker I contacted told me they don't make their own doors and drawer boxes. So, I located a couple of shops that make them on CNC machines and they both said they could use my wood. The door maker cautioned me on the Moisture Content.
  16. I have not looked at the material list in that detail. Given what you're saying, it doesn't really matter then how I draw them in for my plan. Yes, that's how I want the cabinet to look. Guess I'll have to make it with two single doors instead of one double. I didn't know you were a cabinetmaker. I might have to hire you. I know you're quite a distance away from FH, but it is a fairly big job. I've already found a CNC shop to make the doors out of my wood. I found a shop for the drawer boxes that would use my wood, but for the drawer boxes I might just sell my wood and buy the wood that would look better with my cabinet wood. For the drawers I can say that right now I'm sitting on 1000 board feet of red oak at 4/4. Taking it to 3/4" would be optimum but overkill for a drawer box. Plus, Blum glides for 3/4" are way more expensive than glides for 5/8", but you probably already know that. Hopefully I can just sell the red oak and maybe buy and use hard maple or Baltic birch for the drawer boxes, the jury is still out for what I'll use for the bottoms. Many of my drawers will be 36" wide, so they'll need to be a little stronger than normal. I have one that I'm planning for a pullout for my pots and pans, outside cabinet dimensions 36" wide x 30" deep. That's going to have to be built extra heavy duty. I haven't yet figured out that design but I'm thinking of just standing up the large pans vertically parallel to the face frame between some type of rails, and then hanging the smaller ones towards the back and also parallel to the face frame. Not sure how easy those will be to access though. I'm still designing. I plan to have my cabinets made out of my black walnut. We'll have it kiln dried, to 5-7% MC, square it up, and get it out of the Midwest and to the dry desert as quickly as possible. It will NOT be steamed. Haven't figured out what to do with the sapwood yet. If it's done artistically, it can be incorporated into the cabinets.
  17. There may be another bug. I took a single cabinet to illustrate the issue. I wanted to set this up as a partial overlay with a 3/4" reveal. It creates the reveal at the very top, the very bottom, and the very left and right, but not between drawers or between doors. When you tell it to make the overlap 3/4" on a 1 1/2" face frame, when it gets to the drawers the software should probably only apply that once between drawers/doors but it's applying it to both the drawer and the door in the attached picture and thus any reveal is totally gone. I don't see a way to fix this between the doors. I can fix the area between drawers by making the horizontal separation 2 1/4", but this isn't what size it will really be so the materials list will be wrong. I imagine this will get even messier when I try to set up the run of cabinets along the wall as custom with one face frame. I think I better let the cabinet maker get the materials list so it will be accurate. This is really a bummer.
  18. That's a good idea. I'll have to do that.
  19. It would be nice to put doors on the ends of the cabinets as well, but I have not figure out how to do that.
  20. This is interesting. Right now I'm getting the sizes I want and nothing is graying out, so until something funky happens again, I'm just going to continue. I don't think the programmers ever intended for someone to use the base cabinet as a custom base, without defining each one as its own cabinet. This would work flawlessly if I were to convert this to four cabinets and push them together, except for the fact that the stile between the cabinets would be double width, not what one typically gets with a custom face frame.
  21. Oops, the height is now available, but it won't resize what is below it, so even if I put in a deeper drawer, it won't use that number. The blank area below is NOT clicked to Lock from Auto-Resize.
  22. Well THAT is bizarre, but it worked.
  23. Yeah, that's not it. This is crazy. I'm just going to keep playing with. It's like a video game. Sometimes height is available, sometimes it is not. In other cases, the width gets grayed out. And it's not just on this side of the cabinet. I believe it might have something to do with the program's logic of what takes precedence in the layout, but I don't know what that logic is. I was able to finally get the height available, so I put in the cabinet doors below and added some more drawers to the right. Then I decided I wanted the drawer on left a little smaller and I went back to it and the height is again grayed out.
  24. Can someone tell me how I can ungray the drawer height. I have ONE base cabinet that is 107" long and I want to divide it up into four sections without having to create four separate box cabinets and connecting them. These will be custom cabinets and I need to draw them as one. I'm sure that once I can set my drawer heights, then something else will be grayed out. Isn't there a way where I can make all sizing available?