Explore the process of designing a building floor plan, focusing on the placement of stairwells and bathrooms. Learn key techniques such as using the WA keyboard shortcut to draw walls, using the tab key to ensure you get the inside face, and using the mirror pick axis tool to replicate a stairwell on the opposite side of the building.
Key Insights
- The WA keyboard shortcut is used to draw a wall in a building design, and the tab key is used to select the inside face of the wall. The wall's dimension can then be adjusted to the desired value, such as nine feet.
- The mirror pick axis tool is useful for duplicating a design feature such as a stairwell on the opposite side of a building. This tool is used by selecting the design feature, using the mirror pick axis tool, and picking the appropriate grid line.
- When designing bathrooms, it's important to ensure there is enough space for them to fit. The dimensions can be checked and adjusted as needed, and features such as a vestibule can be added for a clear opening. The split element tool and trim extend a corner tool can be used to create the necessary corners.
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For the walls on the other side of the building, we're going to have two stairwells, one here and one here. And what we want to do is we want to draw a wall across that is nine-foot clear from the inside face. If I draw the wall using the 'WA' keyboard shortcut, I can place it.
And the best way to do this, honestly, is just to draw that permanent dimension and use your Tab key. To make sure that you get the inside face and then go in, select that wall and adjust the dimension value to nine-foot. You can also use the temporary dimensions if you're comfortable with that.
But I think drawing in this permanent dimension is going to be the way to go. Now, you may notice that grid line three is right down the center of our building. If I wanted another stairwell at the bottom side, I could use the Mirror Pick Axis tool to place that one as well.
So what I'll do is I'll select the wall, use mirror pick axis, pick grid line three. And you can see now I have a wall that's going to be nine-foot clear because these are six-inch walls. So nine-six means we're giving up three inches on either side.
And just to double-check, we can use the DI keyboard shortcut and draw that dimension in. And there we go. So, I don't need these dimensions on my plan, so I'm going to go ahead and delete them because we don't need them for the final project.
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Our next step is going to be to draw in where the bathrooms are. And so what I'll do is I'll just rough in the bathrooms, kind of like what we did on project one where we just roughed in the walls here. And so I'm using that midpoint because I know I'm going to want these two divided equally.
And so simply, it's just going in and adding the walls. So I'm just going to pick a point here, this midpoint. And then I'm going to pick this midpoint here and draw them in.
And if I were to check the dimensions to make sure a bathroom would actually fit in here, you can see I'll have about seven-six and seven-six here. And this is going to be about nine-four. And so it seems like we'll have enough space to get those in, but I want to make sure we have a clear opening.
We'll end up with a little vestibule here. And so we're going to want to split this wall and then trim it at the corners here and here. If I were to go in and use my split tool, so go to my Modify tab, Split Element.
I will split somewhere between these two points and then I can use my trim extend a corner to create these two corners. If you notice, we're picking the side of the wall that we want to keep. So, I hit Escape twice to get out of that command, then double-click the wheel to zoom extents.
And now we have the general layout of our floor plan.
