Adding doors and windows

In the last few movies, we've focused on the layout of the walls for our two bedroom condo unit. The next logical thing to do is to lay out the doors and windows. So here I have a file called Doors and Windows, and it's a completed version of the wall layout, and we're going to look at the various ways that we can add doors and windows to this layout. So let's start with the doors, and here on the Architecture tab, I'm going to click on the Door tool. And that's going to take me to the Modify Place Door ribbon tab and on the Properties palette I'll see settings for the doors that I'm placing.

Now, the first thing that I want to look at is the type selector, and if I open up the list here you can see at the top that I have a single family in this project called Single Flush, and it contains several types. Now the default type is 36 by 84 and I'm going to choose the 36 by 80 type instead. And that's really the only change that I want to make here. If I move my mouse into the screen what you're going to see is the tip tells me that I need to click on a wall to place the door, and it's confirming that or reinforcing that by the small circle with the line through it, the sort of can't place here symbol.

And what you'll see is, as you move your mouse around, the door will only appear if your cursor happens to be on a wall. So, with that in mind, you need to pay attention to whether or not there's a wall under your cursor. Other than that it should be pretty easy to place doors. Now I'm going to start with the main entrance to the condo unit right over here on this small angled wall. And, if you move slightly, what you'll see is, some snapping behavior that we talked about earlier in this chapter.

The door will try to find the center of this wall. So it's trying to do that automatically. You don't necessarily have to read the fractions directly to see that. You can kind of tell that it's finding the center of this wall. So as soon as it finds the center, all I have to do is click and it will place that door. Now if I want to continue placing 36 by 80 doors, I can just continue to move around my plan and find other locations. And again, this one will snap nicely to the center. And this one will also snap to the center, but notice that it's flipping the wrong way.

It's swinging opposite of what I might like. It would be a little difficult to get into this room if the door was swinging to the left like this. So notice as you move the mouse, it can swing in or out of the room. But to get it to swing left or right, what you actually have to do is just tap your space bar. And that will swing it either left or right. So I'm going to click it to place it right there. And I'll place another one over here. Again, I can tap my space bar. Notice that this time we're getting a six inch dimension there off the end wall.

If you recall the movie on snaps, we talked about the default snapping behavior. That was not limited to just walls. So you can use that to your advantage here with doors as well, to maintain standard size jams. So I can get a six inch jam there, or a six inch jam over here, or really anywhere that I want to see that. So I'm going to continue to place these, some of these in the center. Some of them with the six inch jam, like so. That's all of the single swing doors that I need, but I need to add a few more doors.

I have some closets that require bifold doors, and I have a patio down in the living room down at the bottom of the plan that I want to put in a nice double door. So, I don't have those door families currently loaded in this project. As you can see, all I have is single flush. So what we're going to do is remain in the Door command and over here on the ribbon, we can choose this Load Family button. And I'll click it. And that will bring up the Load Family dialog and I'm in the out-of-the-box, standard, U.S. imperial library.

Your screen might look slightly different. But you should have a Doors folder. And if you open that up, there are several doors that ship with the software. Now, the easiest way to tell what's here is to click the first item and then use the arrow on your keyboard to slowly page through all the available doors that are included here, and you'll see the previews changing over on the right. So you can see there's quite a few varieties for us to choose from. Now what I'm going to choose here is my bifold two panel door at the top, hold down my Ctrl key, and select the bifold four panel door, and then the double glass two.

Double glass two has these mutton patterns on the glass. So I'm going to select all three of those. Click open. It will load those three families into my project. And then if we look at our type selector, we now have those families and their types available to us. So there's several sizes of each of these families included in the file now. So I'm going to choose the 68 by 80 double glass door, and I'm going to put one centered down here in the outside of the living room to get out to our patio.

I'm going to change to the double bifold door, and I'll do a 72 by 80. And I'm going to put that one right here on this closet. And then I'll switch to the single bifold door, and I'm just going to do a 30 by 80 in this case. And I'm going to place one here, and I'm going to place one here. And one right here. Now, I did those a little bit sloppy on purpose and in particular, I'm going to zoom in on this closet right here and show you that the way that came in, it's kind of right against this wall here.

It's also flipping the wrong way. So don't feel like you have to undo and start over again when situations like this occur. All you have to do is select it and it's got its own flip grips, and you can flip it, and it's got temporary dimensions. And I'm just going to make that one inch, so that it gives me a small one inch jam on either side. So, things like that are very easy to fix after you place them, using the same methods that we used with walls before. Temporary dimensions and flip grips. So as a final touch for this plan, I'm going to go to the Window tool.

If you scan the ribbon tabs in the Properties palette, it looks almost exactly the same as placing doors. We have a type selector here. We have choices on this list. We have a lot of the same choices over here. What you'll notice here on the list is all I have is a fixed window which may not be the best choice for a condominium plan. So just like we were able to do with doors, I'm going to chose Load Family. Scroll down to my Windows folder. And choose a more appropriate type window.

In this case I'm going to choose a Casement double with trim, open it up, pick my desired size. There's a few different choices available, I'll use a 48 by 48. And i'll place one in each of the rooms that need a window. Click the Modify tool and that takes care of our door and window placement. So, placing doors and windows is a simple matter of choosing the tool and clicking on the wall where you want it to go. Remember you have temporary dimensions to fine tune their placement.

So, if you don't have the family or type you're looking for in your project, you simply click the Load Family tool. Go out to your library on the hard drive, choose the one you want, load it in and place it in your project.