Vaulted roof and dormer over covered balcony

[LordBeowulf]

Hi,

 

I'm designing a plantation style home with dormers over the balcony since putting them flush with the interior wall looks funny. 

 

 

I have a two story entry way and would like to pull the middle dormer into the entry with a vaulted ceiling, but that doesn't work automatically.  I'm expecting to have to explode the dormer and edit it to get where I need to be, but thought I'd post here and see if there are any suggestions or guidance.  

 

To vault the ceiling, I've added knee walls in the attic to go to the roof without causing the roof line to change, although I'm not sure that's the best approach.  Given that I don't plan to vault at the roof, at least in front and center, I really only need those walls to go to the ceiling, not the roof, but either way I couldn't find a way to get the second story to extend its walls properly to the vaulted ceiling.  I started with just the option to use the roof bottom as the ceiling and had to add the walls to make it work.  Note that the area in the attic (vaulted space) is not being treated as a room by Home Designer.

 

  

 

Now, even though the ceiling and walls are at least starting to look like I want, I need to figure out how to extend the dormer through the balcony to the ceiling.  I'm not sure if I just explode it and extend the walls that will be enough or if I have more work to do to make the walls work and not mess up the roof line.  I also need to add a floor of some sort there.

 

 

Thanks for any suggestions,

 

Beo

[DavidJPotter]

Put the roof planes temporarily on the <A> Attic Level in "Plan View". Then "copy-paste- paste-hold position" your dormers into the roof planes now in the "Attic", once done, then delete the dormers in floor 2 plan view and see if that helps your situation. Dormer objects are pre-programmed to want to avoid existing walls in plan view and I have found that placing them on the Attic level sometimes allows them to coexist with lower level walls.

 

DJP

[LordBeowulf]

Thanks David,

 

The dormers are actually already on the attic level.  I'm trying to push the ceiling of the second story up into the attic and that's where things are getting weird.  The one thing though is that as mentioned I initially started with the room option to put the ceiling on the bottom of the roof plane.  That led to having to add the walls in the attic, etc.  The one thing I haven't tried now that I'm drawing ceiling planes is to go back and put them on the second story instead of the attic and see what that does.  It's possible that would change the interpretation of some of the walls.  

 

Beyond that, one of the things I attempted after posting was to go ahead and explode the one dormer and move the wall out to the end of the opening in the vaulted ceiling.  Problem is that there doesn't appear to be an option to start the wall at the ceiling.  It goes from either being at the roof line and above (default dormer) to being at the floor line up to the roof, leaving the outside open and the inside with a wall hanging out straight below the vaulted ceiling!  There has to be a way to do what I need, but it's not obvious where to tell it to start a wall from a ceiling instead of a roof line.

 

Thanks,

 

Beo

 

[DavidJPotter]

If you will share a copy of your plan, I will take a look and report back, your call.

 

DJP

[LordBeowulf]

I managed to get it solved, although not terribly cleanly/easily.  I was using auto floating dormers, which don't penetrate the roof.  There's an auto dormer that appears to be designed to do what I want, but it appears to have some significant bugs.  I finally just built a completely separate design to test with (attached).  There seems to be some variance just with the room choices for the second story balconies.  I used balconies on my design, but HD appears to consider those only apply to interiors (it wants an exterior wall around them).  I had to manually fix all that in my design.  Here I used a deck instead, which railed nicely, etc. but had other complaints about what I did.  I suspect my original plan also has various issues related to starting on a much older version and carrying it through to 2020.

 

At any rate, in the test file, the auto dormer wouldn't remove the center of the automatic wall for some reason, so you can see the wall through the window.  It also wouldn't even put a window in automatically on one side.  Once I exploded the part and started playing with it I finally figured out I could drag the polygon sides for the wall to get what I wanted, although it constantly wanted to break.  Once I found that I jumped back to my big plan and fought with it until I got what I wanted.  HD REALLY wants to mess things up right about the time you get it exactly where you want it, but it finally at least looks reasonable.  Who knows how it will actually frame some of that out, but...

  

 

Thanks,

 

Beo

Dormer Tests.zip