Fixed exterior wall/foundation dimentions and other constraints.

[FarmerDave]

I'm new user with home designer suite 2016.  I'm doing a remodeling and first need to model the as is.

I've entered the exterior walls and therefor the pored foundation walls w/footings and dimension-ed them exactly being careful to see where dimensions are aligned with in the settings. So far so good. Now during the addition of interior walls the software is changing the exterior dimensions to fit my inner room walls with inexact relative dimensions as I place them.

 

I really want it to not change the exterior walls and rather place inner walls as best as possible or even move other inner walls to stay within the exterior and stay on the foundation that can't (shouldn't) move. It would be much easier to get the model right if I could set some wall lengths as fixed or movement constrained and not something the software is free to change. Its an old farm house (hence my user name) and I suspect I'm dealing with non standard mentioned lumber, odd wall surfaces, and unconventional chimney, stairways enclosures and even a double wall with unaccounted for space within. I'm hoping modeling will uncover some of these places I'll need to do a little demolition to figure out.

 

I have gone though the Q&A that seemed appropriate and tried searching on the knowledge base but don't find this issue addressed. I'm hoping someone can point me to how this might be done.  I do realize this tool is for designing a house rather than modeling an existing one and the flexibility of having it build an exterior to contain your room design is a very useful feature. So I'm not surprised that it does what it does and when I get to designing the new garage/shop will likely find that very handy since I don't have a foundation or even level land yet for a slab. But first I need to figure out how to rearrange the house interior walls within the constrains of foundation, chimney and load bearing walls. I'd like the software to also be constrained by these real life constraints.

 

Hope I've sufficiently explained my question or what I'm trying to do.  Looking to the experts to point me to where I need to go to learn more. And looking forward to a time I'll be expert enough to answer questions in return.

 

thanks,

Farmer Dave

[FarmerDave]

Thanks for the quick answer, keep playing into the wee hours.  I had been using auto dimension when the walls were moving. Turn them off and tried the temp dim and got rolling forward again.  I will go back and play with all the tools in a simple sandbox design, to understand why/what I was doing wrong, and how they all work. Point taken, easier to learn when mistakes are less costly.