GeneDavis

I gotta ask. Why aren't you realizing more income for yourself by preparing the construction docs using Chief 9, which is maybe even more current that the ACAD the draftsman is using. Chief 9 has all the horsepower needed to produce first-class con docs. Why the draftsman? Why not just you? Drawing things twice makes too much room for error. You'll need to learn annotation skills, which include dimensioning, notes and callouts, schedules, and more, but it is all there in Chief for you. And you will need to learn to use layout. Don't ever think you are too old to learn this. Many of us were likely ten years older than you are right now when we first began with Chief. The video tutorials make it all so easy today.

Your 9.0 is pretty old, and most of us cannot remember how it works. Looking at the feature list dated 2003, it had improvements in Layout. That is where you should be sending your views, and from which you should be printing to pages in .pdf format. Why don't you try going to the Chief website and watching some training videos about Layout.

Describe your at-home printing method, in detail. The one you use to put ink on letter-sized paper on your home printer.

And the garage floor gets a nice tile finish as a bonus. Change room type back to garage after.

You want your plan view to have a hatch pattern at the drops for the doors? I know of no auto way to do that. Use a CAD patch if you gotta have it. Walkout basements are typically done with a pony wall scheme, and you will need to manually edit in elevation or section view to pull the frostwalls down and do the stepping. Goes fast, and it is easy to slope the footing undersides (actually sides) at the steps, if you want to match reality.

Here is a nice little French bombe piece one might want to use as a vanity in an elegant powder room. From the 3D Warehouse, imported into Chief, and here is a screenshot.

Look what I did. Hit the RETURN key followed by the space bar. Paragraph breaks make your text much easier to read. There are scads of bathroom cabinetry at the 3D Warehouse site, and any of it can be downloaded into your model.

The Grandview example in Chief's sample files gives an excellent example of elevation views in a construction docs format.

A lot of builders prefer the plans to show where doors go tight to a corner, and their framing subs are trained to know how to deal with it. The builder gives either a sample or cut sheet of the casing to be used, and the framer builds the R.O. so things work out with the casing just barely missing the sheetrock, so no casing rips are done by the finish crew. In those cases of tight-to-corner doors, and a house typically has a half dozen or more, a callout goes on the plans to indicate the detail. Chief helps us out by building TIGHT into the code, so based on your casing size, doors (and windows) run tight to corners get their openings done correctly. So, when doing setup, specify all your R.O. margins, and your casing sizes. But use the TIGHT callouts when trim specs are not known at construction docs time, which for custom or "semi custom" work, is often the case.

Doors are opening-sized, windows not.

Nice, Eric. Now hire the Einstein of roof cutters to frame it.

It's in Sketchup too.

HD Pro has its own discussion forum. This is the one for Chief Premier users, most of whom do not know how HD Pro works.

I do that DVW workout for a client who saves $$ having his own guys, primarily carpenters, run all the plumbing. I get paid to do it, and the few hundred bucks is nothing compared to the fooling around, mistakes, and repeat trips to the plumbing supply house for more fittings. All those DWV fittings I got from the 3D Warehouse have line center indexing points and turn intersect points modeled into them, so it is real easy to pop a fitting onto a turn in 3D. I find the fittings exercise a fun and fascinating thing to do in 3D. The turns at 90, 60, 45, and 22.5 degrees make it possible to meet any routing challenge. The coolest thing is to find out why there exists a "1/6 bend," a.k.a. 60 degrees.

Who pays for those exquisite interior renders with all the lighting adjustments, bump mapping, placement of Cuisinarts on counters, the precise fixtures all per the catalogs?

Here is the V scheme for the project. Not the DW, just the V. Two story house lower level walkout on slab, the venting all tied together to do one pop out the roof. And a zoom in to show the fittings, exactly to spec per the Charlotte pipe catalog, to use at each bend or transition. Those fittings are from the 3D Warehouse.

You can go crazy and model it in exquisite 3D beauty in Chief, or outside Chief in something else. Here is Sketchup and some DW, but not V. Include a matching point in your model, import it into Chief, and stick it on your DWV layer.

Not w/o the plan.

Distribution path control is pretty cool if you want to go random spacing, and random sizing. Watch the Chief video to see it used in landscaping, and you get the idea. Clothes hanger groups could be randomly spaced.

When they are spread one facing each side of wall, no bottom plate header needed. Less lumber for sure. For 2x6 wall construction, which is in play just about anywhere it gets cold, the problem is insulation. No one makes readily available 2.5" thickness rigid foam board, which is what one would want between the headers. Fooling around with 2" and 1/2" is something no framing contractor will do. Insulated headers are available in some markets, but the problem with them is the lack of size availability. Typically they are sold only in the tall 2x12 height. You end up over-headered in many places. But yes, Chief should have a setting whereby exterior headers (and there needs to be a distinction between exterior and interior) may opt for paired 2x lumber, tight, faced to outside, with a plate under.

The followup question is where do you source the tile? All I could find is this, in four colors. Black, white, something called "nude", and another called "pearl." https://www.wayfair.com/home-improvement/pdp/ivy-hill-tile-bethlehem-hexagon-6-x-7-ceramic-field-tile-sost2292.html And this, in black, white, blue, and green. https://www.tilesdirect.net/hexa-ocean-wave-glossy-hexagon-6x7-wall-tile/

As I said earlier, I use the scale in use by builders and framing carpenters and plans examiners and inspectors just about everywhere inch-foot measuring is in play. 1/4" = 1'-0" And I've yet to do a project I couldn't do with one of the industry-standard page sizes, ARCH-B through E. You must work in some alternative universe. Every printer I know works in those paper sizes. But I think I understand your issue. If you are fixed to a paper size due to your own printer's limitation, or that of your print shop, and your plan won't fit at 1/4" scale, but WILL at 3/16" scale, you have two choices. ACCEPT that your text and dimension heights will be 75% as tall as when printed at 1/4" scale, or . . . . . . EDIT all your anno to your smaller preferred size. I find that editing anno height often requires editing placement as well as arrows. Chief won't do it automatically.

I don't think you have the concept yet, Wilson. There is no "scale factor" for text and dimensions. There is a scale one sets when sending a plan view (or an elevation, or CAD detail) to layout. The most common is 1/4" = 1'-0". Another way to look at this scale is that it is 1/48th full scale. Text and dimensions have a height setting. That height is FULL SCALE, i.e. 1:1. The setting in imperial units is done in inches. If your height setting for text is 48 inches, your text will all be 1" high on your layout for any views sent at 1/4" scale. Out of the box, Chief comes with the text and dimensions set at 6" height for 1/4" scale. 6/48 = 1/8. Text will all be 1/8" high for views sent at 1/4" scale, and with text height = 6 inches. I set mine at 4-1/2", so my text is 3/32" (0.093") high at 1/4-scale. Joey sets his at 4, a little smaller. His comes in at 0.083", about 10 percent less than mine. In my opinion, Joey's height of 4 inches for 1/4 scale is about as small as one might want to go.

How many different scales are you using in your construction docs? Most of us use 1/4"=1' for every kind of plan view except for plots, site, landscape, and kitchen & bath. And for me that means there's a need for 1"= 20' for the bigs and 1/2" for k&b. Large-footprint jobs, for me, mean we're gonna go from C to D or even E size paper, because we're always gonna scale at those figures above. So what's the issue here? Plan views are for PLAN views only. They don't apply at all to sections, elevations, CAD details.

Show us a screencap of the situation when you select both windows. The "block" symbol is what you use to mull, and it is there whether or not you can mull the windows. Here is what I get.