Locking as-built walls for an add-on

[jKaufmann]

Home_1970.planI've done enough searching on this problem to know you can't lock walls.  And yet... there must be a way to prevent existing walls from reaching out to "grab" a new wall or constraining the sizing of an added wall.  I have an as-built plan of a home built in 1970, and am trying to add on a 1978 addition (an attached garage + family room + deck) EXACTLY as built, in order to accurately represent the construction details for a 2022 addition (room over garage + modification of family room and deck).  But HD simply will not permit placing walls of arbitrary size next in the vicinity of walls already in the plan, without modifying both the new wall and the pre-existing wall automatically.  How can I stop that? (I have turned off all snaps, but read in the notes that turning off snaps will not prevent walls from automagically resizing and connecting. But there MUST be a way.)

 

[This is my fourth crack at trying to do this. After the third time I decided to start over and "build" it in the same stages as happened, in the hope that I can get what is built to remain as built.  But I see no way to lock what I have. Of course I can lock layers, but I have to work in those layers; it's the only way to make an addition. I cannot be the first person to have this problem...]

Home_1978.plan

[DavidJPotter]

Your opinions about what is and is not right belong to you no matter what I say. I have been a successful professional drafter-designer, 3D modeler for over 25 years and the LAST thing I worry about is walls moving, any walls. What I concentrate on is that when I am finished that the dimensions are correct and accurate to the degree possible. No one is EVER going to Live in a virtual model so perfection is not required in a virtual world, something approaching it is required in the real world and that is brought into being by trained, experienced, competent Building Professionals and not whether or not your Home Designer Pro plan file is 100% accurate. If it is accurate give or take a few inches the Professionals will make it work because that IS what they do, they do not slavishly follow plans made by amateurs' rather they do what they know works. Get your plans as accurate is possible with dimensions and then let the Pro's do what they do, they will conceptually follow your plans and make you proud of the results!

 

DJP

[solver]

It's difficult to offer suggestions without understanding what walls are causing the problems, and what the correct plan looks like.

 

One trick that sometimes works is to draw a perpendicular Room divider at the end of a wall. The wall will join to the Room Divider.

[jKaufmann]

  

1 hour ago, DavidJPotter said:

"... the LAST thing I worry about is walls moving, any walls. What I concentrate on is that when I am finished that the dimensions are correct and accurate to the degree possible. No one is EVER going to Live in a virtual model so perfection is not required in a virtual world, something approaching it is required in the real world and that is brought into being by trained, experienced, competent Building Professionals and not whether or not your Home Designer Pro plan file is 100% accurate. If it is accurate give or take a few inches the Professionals will make it work because that IS what they do ..."

That is such a good point. I must admit it crossed my mind while struggling to make HD stop "helping" -- but I assumed there must be a way, because it seemed like the unwanted behavior was intended to serve some kind of design purpose, and so should be possible to turn off, like a snap.

 

The other reason for continuing to beat on this was that I realized there was another basic point I did not understand, which I think is related to all of the unwanted "help": How HD will take one or more layers of a wall and extend them upward without the other layers, over all or part of the wall's span. I have seen this take two forms -- either up to the roofline, or even above the roofline -- for which I offer examples:

1. Above the roofline: The 2nd-floor front-and-back cantilever walls are faced in cedar shake shingles. To define them, I began with the library's "Staggered Cedar Shake", which defaulted to a 1/2" thick layer. That presented OK, but I decided to make the dimension closer to what it really is: 1-1/2", not 1/2".  With that change, that layer went through the roof (literally), but only on the front (SW) wall, not the back (NW) wall -- even though the roof is defined the same way for each wall.  I experimented with how thick I could make that layer with evoking that weird behavior, and found that if I kept it to 3/4" or less, the artifact went away, so I left it at 3/4" and moved on -- even though I really wanted to know what caused the weird behavior.  I feel like every time I make that compromise, I miss understanding something important.
2. Up to the roofline: I attached two plans to this thread, "Home-1970" (as originally built) and "Home 1978" (an addition of attached garage + cantilevered family room + deck, with full basement underneath). The differences at this point are minimal: If you look at the S and W corners of the plan, you can see two short walls where I begin to draw the walls of the 1978 addition, and immediately ran into trouble. On the W corner I finessed the problem by breaking the wall into two parts, one part with the outer (shake shingle) surface layer, one part (which was attached to the  brick exterior surface of the original house) without that shingle layer. [But still there is an artifact up to the roofline; I just don't know what ir represents.]  On the S corner, where the wall has a brick, rather than shingle, surface, I tried to use the same trick -- which is why you see that little piece of a wall in place, waiting for the more substantial piece to be attached to it. But when I try to attach the wall piece with the brick layer, HD keeps wanting to connect the framing layers of those two wall segments with the framing layer of the original house SE wall. And the reason I think that this auto-connection feature is related to the extension of the wall layers upward to the roofline is that whether or not I allow the auto-connection changes the artifacts (wall layers) that extend upward to the roofline.

I'm sorry those descriptions look so complex. I just spent a couple hours trying to simplify and condense them.  But they do (I think) illustrate this problem of "helpful" behavior that I would like to turn off.  [Attempts to upload updates of the two plan files failed ("Error code: -200"), but I think the versions uploaded earlier today (which may be taking up space needed for the updates, but I could not find a way to delete them) will probably suffice to illustrate.] 

 

I would file a bug report (or two), but thought I should ask here first about the proper way to use HD Pro.

 

Thanks so much for your perspective. I agree that your experience proves the value of that perspective; I'm trying to learn how to accommodate the program's logic to be productive.

[jKaufmann]

3 hours ago, solver said:

It's difficult to offer suggestions without understanding what walls are causing the problems, and what the correct plan looks like.

 

One trick that sometimes works is to draw a perpendicular Room divider at the end of a wall. The wall will join to the Room Divider.

Thanks for your reply. The walls in question are those at the S and W corners of the file "Home_1978.plan".  I tried building a Room Divider. As you said, it inhibits the auto-magical connection, but still does not allow unconstrained freedom of wall placement; there is still some kind of "snap" effect, even with all snaps turned off.

[jKaufmann]

4 hours ago, solver said:

It's difficult to offer suggestions without understanding what walls are causing the problems, and what the correct plan looks like.

 

One trick that sometimes works is to draw a perpendicular Room divider at the end of a wall. The wall will join to the Room Divider.

Also, I should have mentioned: artifacts -- wall layers extending up to the roofline -- remain, even when the Room Divider is used. This suggest that those artifacts may be related to the wall "snap" effect, even when there is no auto-connection effect.