Ceiling Structure, What Does The Number Mean?


cggart
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I understand "Ceiling Finish", and see how it is used , but I don't see that the 5/ 1/2'' (ceiling structure) is used anywhere?  The distance between my floor joists and the top of my wall is 5/8, yet the ceiling structure is 5.5 inches?

 

What is the Ceiling Structure number and why does it exists?

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It only has meaning for the top floor of the building.  For lower floors (actually I do this for all floors) just add layers to the Ceiling Finish.  ie:

 

12" Air Gap

3.5" Fir Framing

5/8" Drywall

 

That will result in a Ceiling that's 16-1/8" below the framing above.

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Thanks for the reply, that seams like a good idea.   When you add those layers to the ceiling finish do you then delete the ceiling structure layers, and just not use them?  Also is the mud/sill plate counted as a layer?  I've seen it added during framing but don't see where its thickness comes into play in these layers?

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For lower floors (actually I do this for all floors) just add layers to the Ceiling Finish

 

 

Hmmm....

 

This seems very counter-intuitive as evidenced by this thread

 

When is CA going to stop creating these "foibles" and newbie-traps :(

 

Lew

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cggart:

 

For whatever reason, Chief's default ceiling framing is 5.5 inches (2 x 6).  As with lots of things in Chief, set your defaults to whatever your project calls for. 

 

Most of my plans call for roof trusses so I don't even worry about the ceiling framing.  Once I check that trusses will be used, the ceiling framing becomes whatever I set the truss bottom chord member size to be.  If I do a two story home, the 2nd story floor system is usually 9.5 inch or 11.875 inch I-Joists with 3/4 inch subfloor over them ... which I spec out in the framing defaults. 

 

Just do what you have to do for each of your projects.

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Some rooms might have a ceiling and a floor above, that's why we have this, no matter what floor its on, like a garage with a second floor over part of the room. The 1 story portion of the room will have ceiling joists.

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Once we catch all the newbies, we will stop setting out the traps. Sorry, bad joke, I couldn't resist.

 

Unfortunately, sometimes things that seem obvious when designing, writing and testing software turn out to be confusing to certain people. As we can we try to take feedback on those things and improve them. However, in some cases the improvments are sometimes viewed as a lower priority because with just a little bit of training the issues aren't so bad.

 

Room heights, ceilings, and the whole interaction with multiple floors has proven to be very hard to make easy to understand. Partly because it is hard to visulize in 3D what everything does and partly because what Chief does is far more complex than even experienced users of the program usually understand so the simple solutions that have been proposed break down for various reasons. We have from time to time discussed creating a "story pole" interface for solving this, but so far the ideas that we and others have come up with don't appear to make the problem of communicating the complex interaction of multiple rooms on multiple floors all with various potential heights and platform levels above and below work out to an interface that is easy to understand. To some extent I think this is mainy related to not making platforms an editable entity, but there is probably more to it than that.

 

It is certainly an area that we are interested in improving.

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Doug,

 

I think the critical element is that Chief is based on "Rooms", not "Floors" in terms of the Structure.  My process on any project with complex floor heights is:

 

1.  Define the basic floor system - first, 2nd, 3rd.

2.  Start at the Top and work down, adjusting floor and ceiling elevations for each room as needed.

 

This is not an intuitive approach - we generally think bottom up, but Chief works the other way by forcing the upper levels to govern what you can do with those below.

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Have some fun and re-generate yourself. Lots of work and X7 coming soon. On your way up look at this very small town called Olancha, believe it or

not ,I lived there as a kid, they filmed a "twilight zone" in our house. My mom wore a radiation badge b/c we could see the mushroom cloud over the

mountains. Not many people alive can say they have seen a mushroom cloud.

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