GeneDavis

A garage with a barn look is to have two garage bays one end, and at the other, two rooms, one a sauna with 90 inch ceiling, the other a lounge with a taller ceiling. One common roof over all, the structure to have balloon framing all exterior walls. I was OK with my progress doing it all one floor, no floor 2, and I was concentrating on getting the structure and framing all done. I then "backed into" doing the sauna and lounge spaces, and cannot find a clean way to do the floor finish, the ceilings, the hole in ceiling in the lounge, and the inside framing for all this. Here is the plan in the stage I was before going to work on the two rooms. (Barh garage one floor) Note the tall window bank at each gable. That will cause problems for me in the next iteration. Barn garage.plan Barn garage one floor only.zip

Take a look at the sample plans on CA's website. You'll see examples of what you enumerated.

For an expensively-detailed garage/barn, siding is vertical WRC with knots, nickle-gap, and needs nailing on 16" centers. I want to let in the 1x2 horizontal girts and then sheath over the flush framing, then do cedar-breather over zipwall then the siding. Is this possible? Clashing wall framing layers? Pic shows the general arrangement, for which I placed the girts against (not into) the framing.

OK thanks all, and I found the molding over at the zero location, but it seems a bug and I'll file a ticket.

@robdyckTry adding a CAD circle to the library. I used the CAD tool circle-about-center, drew one, and there is no add-to-library icon. I can fake it with a polygon but it must be something about needing one straight side.

OK Robert @robdyck for someone like me wanting to use a 3D molding to do a cable railing and then the larger but also circular wood handrail at top, tell me how to make a molding from a circle drawn in Chief CAD.

I need to make the cable railing and the top rail manually for this staircase to get the arrangement I want, and cannot seem to model either the 1/8" dia cables or the top handrail. I do an elevation view, use CAD to draw the line I want (have no idea where in the y axis it might be drawing, then term it a molding line, do the molding selection, and get nothing. Tried the all-off layerset with only moldings turned on and see nothing. What is the trick? This all seems different from previous releases.

Roof beams when "drawn" model immediately below the structure envelope of the roof. Note how it works. You draw it by clicking an origin point and drag and release. A roof beam is a drop beam, in structural parlance. It is placed under the rafters envelope with the rafters bearing immediately on it. Roof beams are commonly placed horizontally under the ridge of joining roofs, and the rafters top ends lap or butt with no ridge member between, the rafters bearing on the dropped beam. Their when-drawn size is controlled in the framing defaults for roof members, and the size (4x12, etc.) can be edited after a member is placed. A member's location can be edited with x y and z movement, and angle movements. I have never understood the angle part. Eric shows the member exiting the plane's envelope into space. It was drawn that way. It got its slope attitude from the origin point and the drag direction and limit. Describe for us what this beam is to do.

Use camera "perspective framing overview" and ensure the layer on which your beam sits is turned on.

The ceiling is on. The roof hole tool, used independently of the auto floating dormer tool, cuts a hole through the roof and the ceiling below. The OP did not say what kind of dormer was wanted. I presumed skylight-type and did that.

Can anyone tell us what closing and then reopening a file does to erase deck framing? I lose deck framing even not closing a file, and never know why. Decks are weird. You lose framing but not the deck planking. Lose a floor inside, and you're looking at the basement. The floor finish is gone, too. But whatever action wipes deck framing, leaves the planking alone.

I don't have a second floor. Auto floating puts the dormer walls on A (attic) level. Perfect for skylight-type dormers or false dormers, which seems to be what's needed here.

It took me a manual ceiling plane and solids for the sidewalls to make it acceptable.

17 seconds to place hole in roof and spec it. Did not adjust size to meet dormer walls.

22 seconds to a gabled roof. Why haven't you done this?

X16, house 30' wide x 24' deep, 5-pitch hipped roof, auto floating dormer, 5-pitch gable roof, 36" high wall, 24x24 window.

Try doing an auto dormer then exploding and editing.

@winterddRob, where did you find "retain framing?"

And lock the layers. Searched help for "retain framing" and got nothing. But when a deck room is selected, there is a box that can be checked that says "Keep deck framing after deck room is deleted."

I failed when I tried doing the ground level step/slab as a landing. Then I went down the rabbit hole of drawing a separate simple square building adjacent, no roof no ceiling so I could see it with an overhead camera, did a landing at the right height to generate a 7 tread stair run, matched all the specs for newels etc., then made a symbol of the stair run. You can place a symbol anywhere you want. In doing so, I could not figure out how to match the stair run in every spec aspect, so thought, why not raise the terrain (it is what determines step bottom when springing off grade, right?), raise the grade/terrain one 7-7/16" riser amount and take a tread off the 8 tread run to get what I needed, then make a symbol of that. In fooling around with the stairs and the grade, I realized you can control the rise with your own input when locking the top, so I did that instead, and ended up successful. The bottom of the 7 tread run sits exactly one riser height off the terrain, and the slab (not a landing) is correctly placed for height and position to make the bottom step and double as bearing for the stringer set and the newels. This little exterior staircase exercise has taught me some stuff I didn't know about Chief stairs. You CAN float a stair section in mid-air if you want. Once you turn off automatic heights, you gain control of the rise and vertical position of the run. I need to play around some more with the stair tools as regards positioning of the railings and newels, to see how various types of deck railings can be done. Thanks to both of you for contributing.

Outside stairs to an above-garage apartment have me going in circles. I'd like to have the Chief model match the one I did as a joinery workout in Sketchup, so con docs can represent this the way the CAD details will show all the construction details. The structure attaches to the building, to four 6x6 posts that are "through" and are the newels of the landing and stair railings. The lower run of the staircase ends atop a thick concrete pad that doubles as the bearing for the stair carriages and the bottom newels, and the lowest step of the whole affair. It took me a lot of fussing with Chief, to get this arrangement where it is. I want the inside-newels dimension and newel-face-to-wall face held as one traverses this staircase, and it is pretty much matching my Sketchup workout, but I am unable to do what I want at the bottom, while generating the two newels at the base. Set away from its position in the Chief model, is the bottom-tread slab. Is there a way to lock and specify both top and bottom elevations of a stair run? I cannot find it.

My out-of-box X16 walls, interior and exterior (like Siding-6) walls have materials set as "Drywall" as default. So the walls are a color, a material named "Drywall." And the material reports to material lists in sheets with sizes like 1/2 x 54 x 144. There is no thin paint layer. What is best practice for painting walls?

So he or she designs, and you do the con docs? Or are you to 3D this and provide renderings. Looks like a poche-fill section cut at about 48" above floor, niches and fancy doorways, and everything on an angle is at 45. Chief can do this fancy plan view style option (all wall lines black, all layers fill black) so we can bill at a higher rate. If it's a con docs scope, I'd ask the client, hey, I cannot imagine I'm your first drafter, how about sharing with me some con docs you have from a couple jobs already built, so I can see the program.

@Kbird1Thanks, Mick. It's a tricky one to get right, and it shows a little flaw in Chief that will likely never get fixed. The flaw (is it a bug?) is what you and I ran up against when doing the cheek wall that sits atop the 2x4 interior wall below, on plan left. The one on plan right is built atop the roof and you built it as siding-6, has no lower pony section, is spec'd roof-cuts-wall-at-bottom, and builds OK. Your version models cleanly when the pony wall side, plan L, is 2x4 wall upper and lower, but when one tries doing the upper as siding-6, it won't model clean no matter what you do. While you get a clean model this way, looking as expected inside, and clean outside in that the siding wraps and renders with no flaws, the model from outside is assymetrical. I drew this in Chief whatever version, back in 2010, when the house got built. I did most all the tricky carpentry during construction, and remember cutting the roof for the framing gang. When doing the model back then, I ran into the same problem as I have today in trying to recreate the job. A new client wants to build a copy of the plan and I did not save the one from way back. See the image from the .pdf con docs used in 2010, attached. We built the walls both sides with 2x4 framing, and padded out the above-roof cheeks with 2" of rigid foam faced with 7/16" OSB. The print says 1x strapping but I know we just used OSB. The image I crayon-marked is from your model, and I am showing how the wall at plan L is 2x4 and on R is 2x6.

Close the file, zip it if over 15, amd attach again.