As I begin here’s a completed view of the floor plan that we’re going to go through and create, our wall elevation and finally a cross section. Let’s open up the program and begin our floor plan. Chief Architect residential design software includes the major architectural elements for walls, windows, doors, cabinets, electrical, roofs, and framing – everything that you need for residential design.
To begin our kitchen I’m going to use an exterior wall tool and I’m going to shape out the rectangular room, just simply by drawing our walls. You’ll notice when I get to the final wall there I get a visual indicator that it snaps to show me alignment. With our dimension tools we have an automatic exterior dimension that you can place the dimensions with, and when you have these walls you can resize them just by simply clicking on them or you can highlight the dimension and enter in a specific number.
In this case I’ll enter 24’ and again if you want to highlight the wall, you can easily move it, resize it. Let’s go ahead and select this dimension and we’ll enter in 32’.
Once we’ve got that setup, if you’re a kitchen and bath designer let’s go ahead and zoom in here. You’ll notice that my dimension is actually going to the outside of this wall, and in Chief Architect our walls are actually composed of different layers. Let’s explore this wall just for a minute. In this wall type you’ll notice that it actually has six different layers here, sheet rock, siding, the sheathing and when I do a materials list all of these components will show up.
Kitchen and bath designers or interior designers typically only want to dimension to the wall surface, so I can set my dimensions up to do that and we also have a specific tool to allow you to do your interior dimensions.