HetrickDesign

Is it necessary for you to model it as fascia mounted? Or can you just reference a detail drawing showing how it should be built? I really wish Chief would get more options for railings. Offset deck railing is quite common.

I took my business full time about 3 years ago when I had a few big projects lined up with a few repeat customers. You have to bring the boat close enough to the dock so when you make the leap you don't get wet. Last year I made well over $100k (actually closer to $200k) and it's just me other than a couple times I hired help. But I'm always working. I will tell you that when you are self employed, you have 2 options: either be swamped with work or don't have enough. Having "just enough work" for a 40-hr work week is dangerously close to having none at any moment. Anyways, I always prefer flat-rate over hourly when it's a project with a set scope of work. It becomes a win-win for both parties. I also switched to a retainer to put an end to the customers that vanish for weeks at the end of a project. They would get offended when I would bug them to pay my overdue invoice. It's amazing how relieving it is when I get paid up front, and it saves the relationship from going south. My rates are below average, but I've raised and lowered them as my demand changed. Lower rates helps you secure more work, but the problem with low rates is when you get super busy you can't afford to hire help. If your rates are too high, you will price yourself out of a few projects. Idk about the demand for work in your area, anyone else's area, but for me it has drastically reduced in the last few months. All of my customers (builders and architects) have been really slow, so it's been slow for me. I do residential and commercial locally and throughout the US, and both have been slow for me. I've been using my downtime over the last few months to learn new skills though. So never stop learning!

Looks awesome, but I guess no automatic arrows to notes? I'm always impressed with the continuous improvements the Chief team makes, but I would think notes with arrows, and better movement of text arrows, would be pretty important.

I'm originally from Central PA, but live in VA now. Looks like you are a Crosscutters fan, I take it? I learned Chief to have a better software for residential projects over Revit. Are you looking for opinions on deciding to learn Chief?

I have a bachelors degree in Construction Management and a vo-tech degree (during high school) for architectural drafting. So you definitely don't need an architectural degree do start a drafting & design business. Just don't advertise your services as an architect and you'll be fine. Many architects would rather focus their time on designing and then hire drafters to do the drawings. It's a win-win in my view.

I just messaged you.

Thanks for your response. I just emailed you.

Hi, I'm about to have some availability in my schedule and wanted to reach out on here to see if anyone needed my services. Attached is a brochure with basic info. I can provide Chief Architect project examples upon request. I take great pride in delivering very high quality construction documents and modeling, and always get great feedback on my work. So let me help you! Thanks, Dustin Hetrick Owner of nVisionTEK, LLC nVisionTEK, LLC Brochure.pdf

Hi, I'm about to have some availability in my schedule and wanted to reach out on here to see if anyone needed my services. Attached is a brochure with basic info. I can provide Chief Architect project examples upon request. I take great pride in delivering very high quality construction documents and modeling, and always get great feedback on my work. So let me help you! Thanks, Dustin Hetrick Owner of nVisionTEK, LLC nVisionTEK, LLC Brochure.pdf

I may be able to help you out. I sent you a message.

Hi Scott, I just sent you a message. Thanks for reaching out to my post.

Hi, I'm about to have some availability in my schedule and wanted to reach out on here to see if anyone needed my services. Attached is a brochure with basic info. I can provide Chief Architect project examples upon request. I take great pride in delivering very high quality construction documents and modeling, and always get great feedback on my work. So let me help you! Thanks, Dustin Hetrick Owner of nVisionTEK, LLC nVisionTEK, LLC Brochure.pdf

I've used the Hover app on a couple properties and have been very impressed. I have the pay as you go membership, so I pay for each property. DWGs cost extra, and I've been fine with using the PDF report they generate that is very detailed. You can always use a PDF to DWG converter to save money, but sometimes that doesn't always transfer over as nice as you'd want it.

For exterior measurements, I would highly recommend using HOVER. I'm amazed what they can do with just photos from my phone. For about $50 per house, I get a full PDF report with an outline of the house, roof pitches, window/door sizes, and just about every dimension you need. You also get a 3D viewer model that you can measure directly from and change materials if you'd like. I did use the room planner app for an as-built before, in January, and was very frustrated by it. I'm all about using technology to make things easier, but I was happy to go back to hand sketching for as-builts. I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable with having an expensive laptop in a home and trying to measure by myself. I'm always rushed to get done ASAP for some reason.

Haha It's nice to read others feel the same about working for yourself from a home office. Still, I would never trade it back for the whole corporate job environment with sitting in rush-hour traffic, dressing up, packing lunches, and sitting in boring meetings and coming out feeling like my time was just wasted. America is home of the free, but you really don't get to enjoy that freedom to the fullest until you work for yourself.

Can you point me to this? I couldn't find the post.

I'm currently working on a project that was created from a homeowner using HD. I will look for that post, thanks.

I'm having this issue too. I guess it's a bug? All lineweights are the same even in the wall type later dbx.

I agree with this. All of my surveying experience has been me being rushed to get in and out for whatever reason. Sometimes I've been rushed so much I wanted to say I'm not responsible for any missing measurements. I'm not sure I could spend any extra time on site doing measurements with a laptop, but I wouldn't mind trying it out to see how I like it.

I only used Room Planner once for a survey. Some measurements didn't make sense when I converted, and I wished I had written the actual measurements to have a better reference. I just wish there were more videos and articles from users on this subject since it's a really important part of the job for a lot of us. I read some people like taking a laptop to a job site with Chief. I worry that it would risk breaking the laptop while moving around or tripping on something.

I'm wondering how many folks here use Room Planner for measuring existing conditions? I tried it once, and felt it was too slow for me, even with a brand new decent spec tablet. I love the idea, though.

I completely agree with this statement. It really annoys me having to go through all of the "commercial" content clutter trying to find residential stuff. Online Revit forums are almost all commercial users that can't help you out. You have a lot of control over elements, but dang, there's so many clicks involved that makes everything takes a long time. I took the time almost a year ago to learn Chief so I can do some simpler projects (or maybe eventually large complex projects too), and like a lot of the speed it offers. Now I just wish I could combine software features. Maybe someday in the future software will be something you can easily build yourself Until then, we have to keep pushing our requests to the software developers to keep improving.

You're welcome! I also tried ArchiCAD as a trial before deciding on Chief. It seemed like a much better version of Revit, but unfortunately not many people in the US use it compared to Revit. It would make it harder for me to find work opportunities when the software selection is a requirement. Most of my work I consider, and others already have, as being very high quality plans and 3D modeling. I see a ton of very sloppy modeling in Revit from other users, which I blame a little on having to custom model so much instead of having the residential content already available. Most Revit users continue to act like they have "THE BEST" architectural software available, when they have yet to try another. Another thing to consider is the annual updates in Revit are always like 2-3 features that have been years behind the competition, and the other handful are all engineering specific features. What I like about Chief so far is that their annual updates have a good list of new features, because they listen more to their users. Autodesk is such a huge corporation that doesn't care about it's users as much as they do about gobbling up other corporations to take over their competition.

Hi Michael. I'm a current Revit expert user that has taken the time to learn Chief for better efficiency. I totally agree that Revit does give great control over almost everything, but it's much better suited for commercial projects where you are an employee not worried as much about how long your tasks take. When you are self-employed doing residential, efficiency is key if you want to be successful in your business. There were a few large high-end flat-rate projects I worked on last year that had me seriously annoyed with how slow Revit is for residential. First of all, I have spent a TON of time creating my own content (doors, windows, lights, materials, fixtures, ect.) because OOTB there is a tiny selection available. Whatever is available OOTB is crap and more for commercial use. There's a few websites with Revit families online, but it's almost all commercial manufacturers that over-complicate things, or crappy families uploaded from other Revit users that require more work to make correct. Simply put, Revit is just not geared towards residential, especially small business users like us. When I discovered Chief, I realized I could have made so much money instead of spending my time creating residential content because Revit didn't have it already available. I recently completed 2 simple duplex projects in Chief, and I was very excited working in Chief the entire time! Everything is geared towards residential and so much is made to be very efficient. For a simple (Revit) recessed light fixture placed on a sloped ceiling, the 2D symbol wouldn't even show properly on the plans. I had to spend HALF A DAY working on my complex light family so it showed properly when sloped. Don't even bother searching for help online from others because the only responses you get are from users that only know how to do commercial projects, and most likely work for a large corporation that allows them extra time to figure things out. Most responses are like you are talking to a robot, and not helpful at all. With Revit, it feels you are mostly on your own if you work for yourself. ChiefTalk is amazing, and it's full of others like us that help each other out! Now there are plenty of things I love about Revit that I wish Chief would add, such as coordinated detail bubbles, callout details, better keynotes, better graphic overrides, better 3D section boxes, ect. But the speed of Chief makes it so much more worth it for residential projects! I appreciate all of the Chief users on this site sharing their knowledge. The only work I'm doing now that I continue to use Revit with are for my clients that I collaborate with that pay me hourly. Every other project I get from other clients are going to be done in Chief Architect.

I appreciate that Rene! I'll take a look at it when I get a chance. I also use Revit LT, and had full Revit for a short period of time. Full Revit uses Dynamo which is really powerful visual programming plugin and is used for some crazy commercial design projects. As I was searching for solutions to simple things, I would read on Revit forums that you have to use Dynamo. I tried it before, but it's sooo complicated and pretty much made for computer wizards. I felt like, there's no way in heck I am going down the rabbit hole of learning to use that thing for such a simple task. That's how I feel with Ruby in Chief at this point, but slowly I'll learn a little at at time.