joey_martin

@DianneDSC you are preaching to the choir. After 20 years, 2 national awards, many great projects in my portfolio, there simply is zero interest or respect for the profession if the people that homeowners turn to don't show respect. Local builders and building officials will not "inconvenience" (their words not mine) prospective clients by needing to spend money for an architect or designer. I have set up booths in spring home and garden shows, been featured in magazines, heck, I even have some of my work used in a college of architecture text book!! All of this interests no one in my area. I love teaching and working with kids. I also love(d) traveling for the NAHB and teaching classes for them, but I would much rather have a thriving design office. I simply could not afford to be ignored and still provide for my family. When the new local building official stopped requiring plans and State permits for commercial jobs, I was doomed. We could have moved down to Indianapolis, or up closer to Chicago and I would have had more opportunities, but we simply love the small, close knit community we live in.

Depends on where you are working in Indiana. I do more work from out of state than I do here to be honest. There are a great many local building department here in the great state of Indiana that do not require home plans in order to pull permits. Heck, my local building department has stopped even requiring commercial projects to get a State Design Release before allowing them to do work. In the past, the local building department required plans for commercial, but now...nope. New pet shop, 2 new pub/eateries, and an updated set of office suites have been completed in the downtown portion of where I live. No drawings, no permits = NO INCOME. Residential, and especially remodeling, forget about it. Napkin sketches, or some scribbles on graph paper from a "contractor" and all 7 of the building departments within an hour of me will give you a permit. Indianapolis and Hamilton county are the only jurisdictions that require drawings to get permits. I now teach full time, but have my office open to do a project now and then when it comes along. I also do some teaching for the NAHB. Do I think you can make $80K? If you are in Marion County, Lake County, or Allen County maybe. Anywhere else, not without some connections from outside the state.

What area of the country? Permit plans in California are far different than permit plans in my part of the country (Indiana).

Send me the particulars and I will shoot you are price. joeymdp@gmail.com

Where are you and how soon?

@Chrisb222 my builders would want a P.T. sill plate bolted on top of the steel beam so that the lumber isn't in contact with the steel, and so that they could toenail the joists into something. Something to consider.

2 ice dams. One on either side of the small ridge you placed in there. When the snow and ice build up and then start to melt, the backup would push it up under the shingles.

That cricket is wrong. Would simply create an even bigger mess. Do it like this.

B/W plot lines with my patterns aet to a gray that I like. Gives me the look I like.

In short, I believe the answer is no. Everything is programmed to the first floor. Chief tends to think in terms of the first floor line being the best place to measure from. While the majority of my builders also think that way, every now and then I get someone that wants the top of the stem wall to be zero, and I am left with doing a lot of math.

How about carving out a corner of the pantry to place the AHU. That would be a little more centrally located.

Make sure the layer for the camera views is turned on. They are probably there somewhere, simply turned off and you can't see them.

As someone that came to Chief Architect from AutoCAD, I can guess that the issues you are having is that you expect/want Chief to operate the same way as AutoCAD and thus, the headaches. My breakthrough came when I 100% abandoned AutoCAD and took a week to completely immerse myself into Chief Architect. Things vastly improved, and now it's the only software I use. As Richard stated already. You can bring CAD files into Chief. Either into a plan view or CAD view, or directly into the layout, though that generally requires some work on the scale.

If you mean this button...then you are looking in the wrong software. It's in SketchUp

Delete that wall and use the half-wall tool and set the height as you want it. You can also use a railing, and turn it into a wall as needed. Also, set the wall to "no room definition" so that it doesn't try to compete with the room specs.

AMEN +1,000,000

What exactly is the question?

Once you send that to layout, does the extra line still show, or is it just in vector view? If it does still show in layout, simply choose the edit layout tool and delete it.

You can't put a door there, there is a wall in the way. Calling it a pony wall with the bottom half invisible doesn't not make it a wall. You probably need to delete that wall and draw the clearstorey wall on the upper/attic level.

I prefer the dashed. "hidden" line, as that method is pretty standard. And while I agree that it should be automated, I would put this down the list of items that I would want priority given to.

Re-draw is your option. There is no bringing it back to a functioning .plan file.

I had honestly forgotten there was a bay window tool. I see by this post that it is still as useless as the last time I tried to use it. I use walls for all bay situations, there simply is not enough freedom with that "tool" for it to be useful. I'm glad Shane pointed you in the right direction.

You can make a custom reference set that shown ONLY the exterior staircase. That custom ref set is what you would turn on in layout to show that.

Same...had to make my own. Only used it once.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/majdi-darwish-aia-pmp-leed-ap-7a686219