Adding doors and windows

Doors and windows in Revit are designed to be host by walls. You cannot place a door or a window independently within a drawing. They need a wall to host those objects so when you place a door a window in a wall you can put it at a rough location. You don't have to be really too accurate about it actually. And you can use alignment lines and temporary dimensions to kind of finalize where you want your exact placement to be. Now, within Revit, there's already a number of windows and door types that are included in the Revit templates.

You can get additional doors and windows. Which can be found in the imperial library. The other thing that happens with doors and windows is that tags are automatically created. This happens exactly when you start inserting into a wall. You can turn tags either on or off during entry, and then later on if you have them all off, you can go ahead and build them back into you project. Let's take a look at how to add in these objects. I want you to come into floor plans.

And first floor, under the project browser and click first floor. And then zoom into the top right-hand corner of the drawing. In this case, what we're going to do is, we're going to put a door in first. So, go to the architecture tab, and pick door, off the build panel, and in the type selector take a look at what's already in there. You're going to notice that there's already two types of doors, that are in here. I want you to go down to single flush. And in the single flush, find the 36 by 84, and click on that.

Now, take a look at the options bar. And on the options bar, you'll notice that there's a number of tools here for tag placement. Also, up on the modified placed door ribbon, you'll notice at the very far end there's a panel called tag. And then there's a blued out area here that says tag on placement. This is an on off button. In a lot of cases, you might want to turn it off when you're initially placing doors because it turns the door tag off, and if you notice now the option bar is grayed out.

I'm just going to come down here and I'm going to plunk a door in. I'm not being too careful about where I'm placing it, and I'll do the same thing over here. When I place, notice that I can place either to the top or bottom depending on my orientation, and then just go ahead and click. I'm not worried again about door swing or anything at this point. I'm just going to hit modify. Now to get the doors to be in a better location, I can come in here and play with the temporary dimension lines, and then use these witness lines to more or less determine how I want my door placement.

In this case, I'm going to come in here and change this to 4 inches. So, I'm going to hit zero and four. And hit OK and it jumps right into place. This one over here, the orientation for the door swing is wrong. So, I'm going to click on that and then use the flip arrows. There's actually two sets that you have. You have and up and down one. And a right left one that you can orient the door, so you don't have to do any move and rotate, and then again, using the temporary witness lines to come in and place the door, four inches away from the corner, so I'll put in zero.

And four inches right there. So with doors, and even with windows which we're going to do next, you don't have to be too accurate in placing them, you just get them into the wall, and then use temporary dimensions to move them into the play. Even if you have a door that's been placed, you can change the type of door. If you select a door, you can go to the type selector, and change some portion of it, you'll notice that there's a number of different heights and things.

If I came here and wanted to change this door from an 84 high to an 80 high, all I have to do is click it and that door now is an 80 inch high door. I can do the same procedure for as many doors as I need to. Just by coming in and doing the type selector, and making it happen that way. Now let's take a look at how to insert a window. I'm going to basically kind of move over to this wall here. And I'm going to the architecture tab and I'm going to pick up the window icon.

And it gives me basically another listing of fixed windows. There's other kinds of windows that you can pick up, but we're going to pick up a 36 by 72. And I'm going to basically just kind of dump it in here and there you see I have my temporary dimensions. At this point I can come over and click on one of those temporary dimensions and let's say I want to center line this from this wall to the middle of the window and I want to move it over about a foot so I'll just come over here.

And put in six, six let's say. And there the window goes right into play. I'll just come up here and hit Modify. Let's also take a look at the window a little bit. I'm going to come down here and click on it. And look at properties, because with windows, windows have sill height, so you can come in here and change the height. So if I wanted to make this let's say, not one foot, but, let's say, ten inches off of the floor, I can go ahead and put that in.

Also, I have a mark. The mark is again the same ID that doors have. Just a different kind of symbol. And I can go and change the mark as well. So in this case I'm going to change this to a two, and hit Apply. And so now that is been marked, and every window that I put in after that will be in at a different number. Another thing that I can do with doors and windows is, I can change sizes. Currently, this is a 36 by 72 size window.

I can come in and click on this. And see what other sizes I might want to use. There's 24 by 72. So if I wanted to change the size of that, I can do that, and it changes the size of the window. Additionally with that, you can also come over and hit edit type. And you click on edit type. You can then go ahead and make a new window type. I came over here and hit Duplicate. I'll change this to a 42, let's say. In size by 72.

I'll hit OK. And then because this is a new type, all I need to do is come in here and change the width of this, so if I want it to be three feet six, I can hit okay, and now this window is of a new type. It's a 42 by 72. Just remember that doors and windows in Revit are designed to be hosted by walls. You can always place a door or a window in the wall at a rough location and then use witness lines and temporary dimensions to finalize your exact placement.