Two Questions: 1st about basements; 2nd about stairs

[contractcad]

Version X9

 

I've got to dilemas, the first one is a pressing issue about foundations/basements that I'm dealing with right now. 2nd one regarding stairs is something I may want to visit in my current plan in the future to give me a little more head height under the main floor going down to the basement.

 

Firstly, I originally drew the plan I'm working on with a walkout basement without a front porch (to be dealt with at a later time) and it had several things going on whereas in making the basement work to a lot of effort and is something I don't want to delete.

I originally created the front porch as a slab and added the foundation walls to it manually which worked well.  I have since discussed with the client that because she need so much fill around the house she could easily turn the area under the porch into a secure room that is attached and accessed from the basement.  I just don't see a way to make it an automatically generated basement room without deleting the foundation and redoing a lot of work.  I can go thru and manually create it, and manually add the floor etc. if need be but wanted to see if there was a trick, process or tool I don't know about.

As for the stairs, I also have a situation where the stair landing at the top of the basement stairs I may want to segment into to or three steps that fan 90 degrees as you step into the stairwell from the main floor. It would give me 8 to 24 more inches of head height as I pass from the stairwell and under the main floor.  I used to have a old home designer version from the early 2000s that was based on Chief Architect which I thought gave me this option in the stair design tools.

[justmejerry]

If your foundation walls under the porch are checked as foundation walls and not checked for no room definition, then they should already create a room if they connect to rest of foundation.

[contractcad]

Yeah, that did work. Had to remove the porch I had finished tho'. My mind was locked into wanting to work top down rather than bottom up.

 

Still wondering about my stair question though.

[Kbird1]

14 hours ago, contractcad said:

Yeah, that did work. Had to remove the porch I had finished tho'. My mind was locked into wanting to work top down rather than bottom up.

 

Still wondering about my stair question though.

 

Winders are what you are wanting is my guess , just keep in mind many jurisdictions don't allow them to come to a point on the inside and may have a minimum of 6" at the wall and 12" at the Walking line.....check that locally.

 

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00884/creating-stair-winders.html

[contractcad]

Thanks KBird1,

 

I was able to get the winders to do something close to what I was looking for but it didn't display exactly how I wanted it. I didn't want an inside radius so I ended up using room dividers with lower floor heights for my 2 winder steps so I had a sharp inside corner and also position them so I made my 6 inch minimum inside tread depth code requires.  Of course it doesn't make the 1" nosing like I have on the rest of the steps but I'm sure I can manually add that if I wanted to (handrails as well).  I don't like that it displays as a hidden wall in the plan view but to me it's good enough.

 

Also, I was actually surprised I was able to get the walls to join well enough at the corners (using my room partition method) to have the drywall join at said corners because initially it was looking pretty bad.

[Kbird1]

Instead of using invisible Walls you can just use Stair Landings also, they will/should auto connect to staircases as well, and can have railings and nosings on selected edges.

 

Mick.

[contractcad]

Yep, placing landings at the top did work, although the stair section didn't automatically attach.  Still had to shut off the railings on the landings though.

[Kbird1]

5 hours ago, contractcad said:

Yep, placing landings at the top did work, although the stair section didn't automatically attach.  Still had to shut off the railings on the landings though.

 

Yes, if the Stairs don't connect then the Railings on the landing will turn on Auto and you will have to turn them off for the selected edge, it can be very finicky at times to get the landings and stairs to snap together every time.