Richard_Morrison

http://www.wallguard.com/wallguards-crash-rails/

The program shouldn't do this, but to fix it, just put a short room divider wall between the railing and the main wall.

I think the problem with calling a guard a guardrail is that often they are not railings. If you look up the etymology of railing it probably will have something to do with horizontal bars. Calling a solid wall a "railing" seems linguistically incorrect.

Guardrails are called "Guards" now.

Another way to look at it is that he is selling the house, and making his profit based on the market value, not his actual labor & material costs. So why should your price be based on the actual labor, either?

I could also suggest that there are too many dimensions here. For example, dimensions between footings at the interior slab are odd, as they may cause the footing dimension to be off. (Usually the footing width is the critical dimension.) If you were to only use critical dimensions -- mostly on the outside of the slab -- the drawing would be a lot cleaner.

I can see that argument, but it's a different business model. Rental car companies first rent the car repeatedly, and then sell the car at somewhat less than market value, recouping some of their original investment. But if they weren't making money on the rentals first, well beyond the difference between the acquisition cost and the sales price, it would not be a sustainable practice. They could, of course, just sell the car for an inflated price, but it would have to include all the lost revenues from the potential future rentals, or it would be just a stupid business practice. In this case, the builder would be hoping to save money beyond a repeated license fee, by paying an inflated initial cost, but undoubtedly much less than the repeated use would cost. I guess there is a price that it would make sense to sell the design outright, but I think the usual business practice would be to have the license and control of the design maintained by the designer. There might be a sliding scale for reuse, say: 50% for first, 40% for second use, etc., down to some percentage that everyone thinks is fair for larger quantities.

Imagine a customer walking into a car rental place and saying, "I'd like to rent a car for a week. But I'll pay you four, heck, FIVE times the usual rental fee. In exchange, I get to drive the car whenever I want -- forever." How would you suggest the car rental company respond?

Chop, I gave you one, too. I learned something with this.

The 3D viewer software will let them do a walkthrough, but has no editable information.

I don't want to stick my nose into this too far, but generally, if a house was originally built using pier and grade beams, it is usually because the soil bearing capacity is not very good. Using a different type of foundation (slab) is asking for differential settlement issues. The least competent person to be giving you directions on the type of foundation to use is the homeowner. I would strongly encourage you to seek the services of an engineer.

I just tried "Edit Area" on Johnny's plan, and it worked just fine, including rotating.

I'm not sure what you mean by "get them back." You should have the normal archived versions of the plan set to copy the details from. You should have detail files already in your template, where you could copy them from. And you might also have gotten in the habit of saving an additional copy of each detail to the library to copy from. This does not even get into your daily backup routines, where you also should have copies. I'm not clear where this one-way ticket to oblivion is coming from.

Whoa.... That's almost 500 sets per year! 10/week or 2/day. I don't know of any other firm that cranks out two permit sets per day.

Yes, but you have to put THREE closely spaced elevation lines at that elevation.https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00574/how-chief-architect-interprets-terrain-lines.html

Brushpark, You need to search the forum, not "This topic". You can see what you are searching just to the left of the search field. If you use quotation marks, you get the search for the phrase; without the quotes you get everything with electrical OR connections, which is too much.

If you do a search on the forum using the phrase "electrical connections" (using the quotation marks), you can find out, and also get some suggestions.

We can't. It's a new feature in X10.

Michael, Just FYI, stairs don't block. I think Justin's idea is the easiest and best-looking, although the bullnose tends to deform slightly when converted to a symbol. Thanks, all, for the ideas!

Thanks, Johnny. I had high hopes for your approach, but it took a large "bite" out of the wall above.

In drawing the existing conditions of a Victorian, I am trying to figure out how to get the bottom bullnose tread to extend into the entry hall. (Where it extends in reality is shown in red.) But because there is a wall there, the bullnose won't extend into the doorway. Defining the wall as "no room definition" doesn't help. If I move the wall away, the bullnose appears, but that doesn't put the doorway where it needs to be. Any suggestions? (Yeah, 2D CAD may be option.)

Maybe https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/72/additional-floors-foundation-basics.html

Larry, I don't disagree. I have had to settle into the the conclusion that the only logic in having ceiling heights controlling floor heights is that if you think of rough ceiling heights as the rough framing heights of walls, it kinda sorta makes sense. Most builders probably are going to set the walls based on stud lengths (nominal 8', 9', etc.) , and the floor joist depths are whatever they are. If you start manipulating floor depths, then the ability to reset wall heights using default relative rough ceiling heights is very useful.

I haven't seen anything about this mentioned, but one of the issues that used to drive me nuts was the tendency for floors and ceilings to act like "jello." You'd adjust one floor, and then others would change, and there was a constant back and forth getting the floor and ceiling heights to be correct. I just spent some time working with floor elevations in a cross section, and now it all seems to work the way you'd probably want it too. It used to be that you'd have to start at the top floor, get everything right, then move to the next lower floor -- being REALLY careful. Now, you can also start at the bottom and work your way up. When you finally set the top floor ceiling height, the wall top STAYS at that elevation, regardless of how you now change the floor elevations. Also, it seems like there is more error control. If you try to adjust a room with multiple ceiling heights, you are only allowed to adjust the floor elevation, rather than create a mess. Foundation floors and stem walls seem to work properly. Anyway, whatever Chief has done, I think it's a huge improvement, so kudos to the programmers. EDIT: I still would prefer the foundation floor to control the stem wall height, the way it USED to work. It used to be that you'd set the foundation floor, and the stem wall/footing could be raised to the bottom of the floor, but no further. It could go below, though. I don't like that the stem wall can change the floor level.

No, the keyboard should be in front of the main monitor. If you are working on your laptop, and turning your head 90 deg. to see the screen, your neck will not last long.