GeneDavis

I don't have X9 or X10, but if I did, you could Venmo me the cost of a couple of Arturo Fuente Short Story cigars, and I'd knock that out for you. Or instead, you can roll your own, so to speak. Import the image into a CAD detail, resize it to get it close to scale, draw over with Chief CAD tools, annotate with Chief text tools, and give yourself a pat on the back. Set your stopwatch. It should take less than ten minutes. Five, the second one you draw like this.

This presumes you need us to look at something in the building. Copy it, then strip the copy of all that is not stuctural. Remove terrain, fixtures, furniture, clean off any weird textures you may have applied, the file is to contain no plants, no people, no nothing but walls, floors, roofs, windows and doors.

I hope I stated this so as to be understood. I need a larger scale for some details I want to do, and having a default set for 1" = 1'-0", went ahead and wrote a new default set for 1 1/2". I had already created a text style for this new scale. I'll need to write the appropriate specs for rich text, arrows, callouts, and the rest, but for now I am starting with text. See here that my newly created text style appears in the lineup. Now see here, in this screencap of the default set dialog, I cannot see the text style in the dropdown, and thus cannot assign it to this default set. What am I missing?

Pretty long discussion for a Home Designer 2026 issue.

I made a house with enough roof area to do what I wanted, then manually cut a hole in the roof and built the dormer walls connected to interior walls so as to have it be a "room" with a ceiling and roof over, then used a different wall type to draw the three balcony walls, and manually adjusted their shapes. It's a mess, but it's a start. You can use the window tool, pass-through type, to make the scuppers. If you can shape windows into a trapezoid, you can shape pass-throughs. I think the glass and metal railings will need to be modeled manually using whatever you like. Solids would be my choice. Others might use cabinets.

Did you see this? https://www.chiefarchitect.com/videos/watch/5202/creating-floor-platforms-that-hang-inside-walls.html?playlist=144 Try building with a 4-1/2" thickness mudsill and then editing it to a 3-stack after your framing is all the way you want it.

Why three? Is it to get your wall finish closer to grade?

Raise the larger roof plane 10 inches? Those rafters likely bear on a plate atop the floor frame.

X17 Help describes its operation and shows the tool.

You know that CTRL+ALT bends an arrow, right? Click its arrowhead end, hold the two keys, and move curser around. Play with it. Might be useful for you.

OK I figured out what's up with this. The appliance from Chief's library is placed in the cabinet's center, in plan view. Most call this "dropping it in." Done that way, there is no issue with placing it in a 24" wide base. Here is what Chief does to the 3D appliance, so be aware. The product has a total height of its front equal to 15 7/8", so if your opening height is that number, the oven will be put into the cab with its correct height. But Chief will put it into a 13" high opening, and also a 17" high opening, shrinking it on its Z axis or stretching it to fit the hole.

Hey @steve_stuart, to paraphrase the Bee Gee's song, "How deep is your cab?" Actually, give us ALL your cab specs. Framed or frameless, separation, width of cab, height of cab, depth, run from top to bottom of front to give us the top separation, the opening height, the separation under the MW, and the reveals for each of those two separations. I cannot get it into and opening if I make the opening the size of a garage.

The appliance-insert method within the cabinet spec dialog won't give me the 3D result I want. I'm doing a frameless base, 3/4" sides, 3/4" "separation" and am looking at Sharp's installation instructions that call out an opening of 22 1/8" opening in a 24" wide cabinet. I have installed these and it's always been in a 24-wide box, with a 22.5" opening width. I tried it and Chief says no, need larger cabinet. The image here shows what I get when I manually insert the appliance into my 24-wide box. Exactly the look I want. It is the KB6524PSY from Chief's Sharp manufacturer catalog. But why doesn't it work as appliance insert in the cab spec dialog?

I solved it! Import the object and check it in as an interior fixture, and checking advanced options. It's not intuitive, but just as you do for the Rev A Shelf pullout, you go into the drawer spec checking the appliance thing, and you can then in the next spec page that opens, ID the pullout object as a pullout. In the pic shown here, the one on the L is for spices, the Hafele one on the R is for oils, vinegars, and any other cooking pourables that come in tall slim bottles. The flank the range.

Study the photos and you'll see the ridge jump on the main left wing. It's that jump that raises the front roof plane so its eave is above the porch roof. That rise is not in back, where the porch roof's ridge matches the high roof's eave, where they join. That roof feature, front plane eave raised above a porch roof, is seen on so many "modern farmhouse" plans, it's become an architectural tic.

Take screencap pics of your problem, post the pics along with the plan file. You know what to do with the plan file. Make a copy of it, strip out every thing in it that is not wall and roof and floor structure, to make file size, when compressed, 12 megs or under. Close Chief , zip file, attach here along with the pics. Also, if what you are trying to do is replicate that plan, link us to the plan seller's website, to the exact page of the plan, or attach screencaps of the floor plans.

From Hafele's site, I downloaded a .dae format model of the base pullout I want in a cabinet. In importing the symbol, I specified it as a door/drawer. Maybe that's the mistake. Anyhow, it can be placed in a Chief model. In this pic, shown L to R, are the Hafele pullout, a Rev A Shelf pullout, a cab into which I placed in 3D space, the Hafele pullout, and a cab with single drawer, the drawer pullout (in the cab spec dialog) specified as the Rev A Shelf. I want the Hafele to behave as the RAS item does, that is, it replaces the drawerbox (being itself a pullout) and can show nicely in a 3D view when show-drawer-open is checked for display. That cab in the pic that contains it, is specified as a single-drawer in front, and in the pic you can see the drawerbox. Note there's no d'box in the other cab, the one with the RAS organizer. How should I do the import the right way, to make this work?

It's Z-position. Open that 3D panel. Fool around with it, you'll figure it out.

I am drawing a CAD detail on a CAD detail page (CAD > Cad Detail Management > New) and have used the line tool, rectangle tool, spline tool, and made a few point to point moves of rectangles as I blocked everything in. Look at this. See the point markers? I have deleted the five points once, did a screen move, they came on again, and I deleted them again. Now they have re-appeared. Why this behavior?

Note the "room" under has a slab floor. Invisible walls define the porch "room," and the attic walls above have roof directives, the front gabled, the sides not. It's a no-brainer.

It's not doable in Chief, so I uncheck label in the beam's DB and write a label manually. For me there aren't that many beams in a floor plan, and I like to add "FLUSH" or "DROPPED" in the label.

Give us a screencap of what you see, because I just opened the file, took a 3D perspective overview, and see no transoms anywhere.

Hey, @robdyck, I tried it and it doesn't work. It may only work when you change both eave and gable subfascia to 7 inches, but in my particular case, I want the 5.5 on gable and 7 on eave, and when I do a rebuild with those set thus, I get the same glitch. And the glitch is only in 3D, as reported before. A backclipped section shows the sub-f at 7 inches depth. I'm good to go for con docs. Nobody but me is gonna see the 3D view with its glitchy result. Got the same glitch on a brand new quick test plan. I am going to send it in with a ticket and see what Chief says.

Thanks, @robdyck! Looks as if the only "built" that matters is Chief autobuild, in this case. I'll do this on a copy-file first, to make sure the rebuild leaves all the trusses alone. I spent time editing those trusses to be what I want. The gable sub-f stays at 5.5 and only the eaves go to 7.

Taken from same plan. Open and see. 1300 sf Shoebox House.zip