Richard_Morrison

I am unable to understand the logic behind why the foundation DBX moves floors up and down. Once I set the floor height in one location, I do NOT want playing around with stem wall heights and footing heights to change this. Currently, if you are not really, really careful, raising the footing too high will take the floor level up with it. Then you have to lower it and then lower the floor. I find myself going up and down with footings and slabs and ceilings. Is this really useful to anyone? Seems to me that floor heights ought to be pretty stable with everything else revolving around those. I went back to chieftutor.com to watch dshall's videos, thinking that I had missed something. The first two videos were pretty much him blundering around with all of this. (I'm not criticizing you, Scott. Not your fault.) This isn't good.

Joey, don't say I never did anything for you: https://youtu.be/9zEC9ZoVMss

Joey, The macro for the cross-box does not work with the PSolid. You need to use the other macro.

A simple closed polyline can be attached in the interior -- IF it has a fill. The big advantage that a polyline solid has is that you can SUBTRACT areas with holes, and it will calculate the resulting area correctly. Joey, Could be that don't have "Referenced Object" selected next to the evaluation checkbox. If your text leader has attached to the object, then you should get that macro as a possible macro to insert into the text DBX. Maybe watch the video again? BTW, there are two macros: one for cross-boxes, and one for closed polylines. Are you using the right one?

Glad to hear hear it, Curt! The only hoops you need to go through are a little hassle getting the YouTube settings right in Snagit. But then it's pretty automatic. I think one issue in Screencast is that there is no file compression as I understand it, so the videos may take significantly longer to load. YouTube compresses the file to be much smaller.

Joe, Closer, but still not quite right.

Joey, And what are you calling that historical style?

Joe, I did. But something is still out of whack. See attached. I just put in a few vents, and resized them randomly.

Joe, Thanks for doing this, but something's a little off. Total is not updating properly when sizes change.

The easy way to do this is to make the floor a polyline solid with fill, using the room polyline tool. Where you would put the floor material region, put another polyline solid, but make this a "hole". Holes can have fills, too! Then the toilet will block out the polyline solids' fills correctly. I don't know how this will work for the materials list, but will look fine on the plan. For 3D, set the polyline solid to be 1/16" higher than the floor material, and make the floor material what you want to show in the hole.

No, it's not that easy, because unless you put them in the bottom section of a pony wall so you can display the upper section in plan, they will show up on the floor plan and be very confusing. Not sure yet where the sq. ft. is coming from, but you are right that it does seem wrong. Certainly for a louver vent with reduced NFA.

Larry, You are right about the 3D views. Not sure why this seemed to work before. Here is a picture of the same vent symbol, on the left placed into the foundation and dragged up, on the right placed into a pony wall on the first level. (Top & bottom of pony wall are same wall type.) Creating a window gives you some more flexibility with placement and 3D look, but less flexibility with the schedule. I guess you take your choice.

I have just spent a few hours playing around with macros, and am nowhere near the level of Joe and Gerry. But still, I thought it would help someone who hasn't even spent a little time get some benefit. I would, of course, like a label for closed polylines, but having a text with arrow do the same job isn't too horrible a workaround. Just used SnagIt, and posted directly to YouTube from the SnagIt toolbar, which avoids the bandwidth limitations in the free version of ScreenCast.

It looks identical, IF you go the frame and adjust the inset. (Need to uncheck "Fit Frame to Wall.") However, it will schedule with a VT prefix and the schedule can be set to show only vents. So you can have part basement, part crawlspace, with windows and vents labeled differently.

Maybe I wasn't clear. The Library vents (both foundation and gable) are NOT dumb symbols, really. They are actual WINDOWS with the "Vent" type already defined, which is not available elsewhere. They also have their own label type, which is nice.

dshall, I originally started at the same place as you did, but when I moved the vent up into the joist space, the rim joist and the stucco made the vent not look good. Your video reminded me that we can use a negative inset to get the window or vent to move out. So, good job and thanks! Take a look again at the vents in the library. They are made from windows but are a special window type: VENT. I'm not sure why that choice is not in the drop-down Window DBX, but it isn't. Seems like you can only get there by using the library symbol, or creating your own. But VENT is a separate type of window that can be scheduled by itself, and has the area available for scheduling. Unfortunately, there is no Net Free Area available, which would be awesome, but maybe in the future. BTW, gable vents from the library can be scheduled similarly to foundation vents.

My first attempt. Thought this might be helpful to someone. Not as fancy as Joe's, but easy. https://youtu.be/ndltFz2RAsY You will need to import the attached macros into your drawing to get the same results. BTW, I misspoke on the video. The area which is evaluated for cross-boxes needs to be divided by 144, not 44. Macro is correct, I just wasn't listening to myself as I was talking. ;-) Also, the area polyline macro (not the cross-box one) will work for polyline solids, as well. One nice feature of this is that you can have holes in the polyline solid, and the text macro will display the correct area with the holes included. Area Macros.zip

Yeah, I did. Thanks, Perry. If most people don't have this issue, might have something to do with having files on Dropbox, but not sure how since these are local files. (sorta)

I thought that I had this solved by reducing undos and recent files, but apparently not. I am getting, somewhat randomly, about a 3-4 sec. delay when selecting an item, hitting the copy button or CTRL-C, before it is ready to paste. This is not just with large files, it is also occurring with newly opened files and a very limited amount of data. Anyone else get this and have a solution? It is happening on multiple computers, so probably not hardware specific.

Wasn't really the question, but you should be aware that there are already foundation vents like this in the library. And if they are designated as vents, rather than windows, you can easily exclude them from window schedules, and also create a separate vent schedule. Hope that helps. ;-)

Has anyone found a good strategy for placing crawlspace vents? I'm talking about the 5" x 14" type that sits just above the mudsill, usually within the floor joist space. Put them on the first floor, they screw up the floor plan. Put them on the foundation level, they don't display properly in 3D. So far, the best option seems to be to make the first floor a pony wall, with upper & lower the same wall type, and put the vent in the lower portion. But maybe I'm missing something.

Joey, in this case, it clearly is completely arbitrary, but there ought to be a real estate disclosure that covers this, and the sales price should be adjusted accordingly. If it weren't disclosed, there might be some liability for the non-disclosing parties. Who knows, maybe the real estate agent will end up paying for those wood windows? I think the free market forces should be able to take care of this particular issue, though.

Rich, That song by Malvina Reynolds was written about Daly City boxes, not Eichlers. Daly City boxes are still ticky-tacky, and I haven't heard of any preservationists defending them.

I agree with the notion that just because it's old, doesn't necessarily make it worth preserving. Also agree that an arbitrary cut-off point is stupid. What if the 1941 building is garbage and the 1942 is a Frank Lloyd Wright house? What Palo Alto did was to create a registry of historically significant houses, in several tiers of significance. If you are in a house that is VERY historically significant, you can modify the exterior less than a house that is in the registry, but less significant. Owners of the houses had a chance to appeal the ratings, as well. But now that it's done, it's done. Any prospective buyer of a house knows how historically significant the house is considered to be.

There are a number of one-story Eichler neighborhoods in the Palo Alto area. Not too long ago, you could legally do a two-story house in these areas, but after some of the Eichlers were torn down to make way for two-story "foreigners," which stood out like sore thumbs, the neighbors got together and got the City to approve one-story "overlay" zones to protect the remaining character of these neighborhoods. The sore thumbs are still there, of course. Now, you can say that this transition "stole" a right that people thought they had when they bought their property to build second-story square footage in the future. Or, you can say that the two-story folks were stealing the character of their neighborhood, as well as some of the privacy of their one-story next door neighbors. Should community values trump individual rights? I guess we all have to decide that for ourselves. In a true democracy, though, community values is likely to prevail, which is always going to anger some people who feel like something has been taken away from them. Which is more "American," community values or individual liberty? I don't think you always can have both.