Bi-Level house garage foundation and walls


Steve_Nyhof
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8 minutes ago, DzinEye said:

I'm only very modestly experienced with bi-level houses in Chief, but from my experience, I've found that you always want to start with the lowest level and work upward.  In our minds we usually want to work from what we consider to be the main floor and then up and down from there.  You can get away with getting in a floor below but beyond that I found it will screw things up.  

This is very good to know. I will also give this a try. All of this is helpful in learning how Chief likes to play

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Just now, stevenyhof said:

I will look into this - I do have a section open all the time so I can see my results.

 

For a garage (for example) on a bi-level home, you may want to at least experiment with dragging the room heights, for both the main floor and the foundation. 

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1 minute ago, robdyck said:

@stevenyhof You mentioned things Chief can or can't...Here's an example of can't (at least not easily). In the example below, a full height basement foundation wall transitions to a stepped foundation pony wall. Chief will not connect the footings if the footing step is at the same location as the wall type transition. If I manually drag the footing down, Chief creates a 12" vertical footing. There's ways around this but they are relatively time consuming.

image.thumb.png.66cd01e0c27fbc9971d444257a8099f5.pngimage.thumb.png.9700c3fad5e43852883d7f7183ac3c82.png

I have already messed a lot with daylight and walkout foundations with Pony walls and am very pleased with my results. I found a specific order, but I do not get the vertical footing but exactly what I was hoping in a stepped footing. I think I have since deleted these test plans, but as I move forward I will upload my results.

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2 minutes ago, robdyck said:

For a garage (for example) on a bi-level home, you may want to at least experiment with dragging the room heights, for both the main floor and the foundation. 

I have tried this in elevation view, and the snaps do not work, or work often. And I am always left with 2 lines where it was that I cannot get rid of. I feel I am making some progress and will upload what I have at some point - Thank you!

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1 minute ago, stevenyhof said:

I have already messed a lot with daylight and walkout foundations with Pony walls and am very pleased with my results. I found a specific order, but I do not get the vertical footing but exactly what I was hoping in a stepped footing. I think I have since deleted these test plans, but as I move forward I will upload my results.

If you need it...

image.thumb.png.6ee9e4f5ab1e359c9512c8ff4f8318ec.png

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Just now, stevenyhof said:

I have tried this in elevation view, and the snaps do not work, or work often. And I am always left with 2 lines where it was that I cannot get rid of. I feel I am making some progress and will upload what I have at some point - Thank you!

Do you have 'cross section lines' layer turned on?

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2 minutes ago, robdyck said:

Do you have 'cross section lines' layer turned on?

I would like to see the section lines on my section. The layers for Section show on. But I have been using my ADT to figure out the heights

layer.jpg

sec.jpg

sce3.jpg

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8 minutes ago, robdyck said:

I'm not intelligent enough to pick up what you're putting down...you'll probably need to spell it out for me!

Your presence in the forums would certainly prove otherwise :)

Spelling it out, I was illustrating a stepped foundation with default wall heights..
You can very quickly make a stepped foundation in chief without manually dragging walls...in fact you can have dynamic control over stepped location if one were to free their mind of floor level associations. 
You can have an infinite combination of floor levels with options of "floor under this room" designations, balloon framing, and splitting room heights to create all sorts of platforms

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Here's a brief video showing how dragging a room height can be beneficial. In this example, I have my house positioned on the lot, and the final grades have been decided. My grading info is metric so sometimes it simpler to drag the garage room down to the driveway elevation instead of doing math. I have my driveway layer turned on temporarily to get the snap point. And in this example, my garage floor is the top of the gravel substrate, and the 4" concrete floor is in the floor finish layer (just for automatically correct cross section display).

 

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5 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

Your presence in the forums would certainly prove otherwise :)

Spelling it out, I was illustrating a stepped foundation with default wall heights..
You can very quickly make a stepped foundation in chief without manually dragging walls...in fact you can have dynamic control over stepped location if one were to free their mind of floor level associations. 
You can have an infinite combination of floor levels with options of "floor under this room" designations, balloon framing, and splitting room heights to create all sorts of platforms

OK, I hear you and I did notice your default heights were still active. I 'm not sure I could free my mind to that extent. Rather, I leave the steps until the house is in it's final position on the lot, and I have the final grading determined. Then, I create reference lines in elevation view so I can ensure the following:

  • all footings are below frost depth 
  • top of conc. walls are at least 6" above grade
  • all steps are at even 2' horizontal increments for simple forming (when possible of course)
  • no footing steps exceed 24" in height
  • no foundation pony walls have backfill heights exceeding 4' above the basement slab
  • all foundation wall step dimensions can be easily relayed to the excavation and foundation crews.
  • and I need to relay the footing elevations in imperial for the foundation crew and in geodetic metric for the survey crew
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So here is what I found... (It's working! Its's working!!!)

  1. I made the main floor and made 2 rooms - one for house and one for the garage
  2. I found that when I made the garage room specs with the wall height as I wanted it to end up (9'), I failed to bring it down later after moving the floor down.
  3. So I undo, and this time made the ceiling of the garage where I wanted it to end up based on the 0 point of the main house floor - and only made that change and OK.
  4. Then I created the foundation. Broke the walls between the house and garage, and set the Wall Type heights for the floor and wall top.
  5. Then opened up the garage room and made my height adjustments.

My typical plans do not show a stud wall on the foundation document, but I think this is fine, unless there is a way to hide the garage stud walls only.

Bilevel test.plan

Bilevel garage to house.pdf

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7 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

Spelling it out, I was illustrating a stepped foundation with default wall heights..
You can very quickly make a stepped foundation in chief without manually dragging walls...in fact you can have dynamic control over stepped location if one were to free their mind of floor level associations. 
You can have an infinite combination of floor levels with options of "floor under this room" designations, balloon framing, and splitting room heights to create all sorts of platforms

Nice Rene!  So... is there a video or instruction showing this methodology or something you picked up on your own? 
If you can ever fit it in.... show us!:)

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  • 1 year later...
On 7/15/2020 at 9:39 AM, robdyck said:

You mentioned things Chief can or can't...Here's an example of can't (at least not easily). In the example below, a full height basement foundation wall transitions to a stepped foundation pony wall. Chief will not connect the footings if the footing step is at the same location as the wall type transition. If I manually drag the footing down, Chief creates a 12" vertical footing. There's ways around this but they are relatively time consuming.

 

@robdyck I wasn't able to snap to TOF. Are you creating those markers manually and doing the math?

 

 

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7 hours ago, stevenyhof said:

 

Very clean looking, interesting way to do it and I like the way you get the vertical distance with the reference line.

 

How are you getting the horizontal distances? I cannot get the dimension to snap. I had to draw vertical lines for each change below, and then fiddle with them to be exactly 6'  and 8'

 

image.thumb.png.68d85ba36f955d6627362518e967a5f3.png

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51 minutes ago, jasonN said:

 

Very clean looking, interesting way to do it and I like the way you get the vertical distance with the reference line.

 

How are you getting the horizontal distances? I cannot get the dimension to snap. I had to draw vertical lines for each change below, and then fiddle with them to be exactly 6'  and 8'

 

image.thumb.png.68d85ba36f955d6627362518e967a5f3.png

Here you go...

https://www.loom.com/share/f4a2aa3a3707454fbeb69a0399e82abd

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1 hour ago, stevenyhof said:

Here is another from the elevation view, but I do not bother doing this - never did.

https://www.loom.com/share/dc4660196d734590b4bb86e3fa633881

thanks for trying, looks like you did same as i, drew a vertical line to snap to.

 

I was actually fortunate on this one that I could just draw room dividers and set the stem wall height in the room(did not have to drag the wall up or down), only thing I had to edit was the vertical footing piece 

image.thumb.png.16b4a56b983a974e084eac79ff14384b.png

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