Discover the intricacies of designing a commercial restroom that adheres to the ADA guidelines, focusing on the importance and implementation of clear areas. This article details the process of creating these spaces using AutoCAD, offering a step-by-step guide on crafting the perfect restroom layout.
Key Insights
- The article discusses how to design a commercial restroom in accordance with ADA guidelines, emphasizing the need for clear spaces to ensure safe navigation within the restroom. These clear areas can be created using simple shapes in AutoCAD.
- Various clear spaces are outlined, including a turn radius (a 60-inch circle allowing for a 180-degree turn in a wheelchair) and clear spaces around the door and in front of the vanity. The article provides detailed instructions on how to draw these spaces in AutoCAD.
- The article demonstrates how to accurately position and label these clear spaces in the CAD model, offering insights into the allowances and restrictions that dictate the placement of these spaces. It's noted that certain clear spaces, like those in front of a wall-mounted vanity, can overlap due to the potential for under-counter mobility.
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Now let's move to our next sheet, I-201, and it entails restroom details. Let's jump right into our restroom enlarge plan. We'll zoom into it, and then we'll double click to activate that view.
Once it's active, we'll see our little model tab down there, and what we want to do is add in clear spaces. Why do we need clear spaces in restrooms? In a commercial restroom, we're required to meet the policies of the ADA, and they dictate things like the height of a vanity, the height or locations of grab bars, and something called clear areas. Clear areas are open areas that we need to leave open so that there is room to safely navigate the bathroom.
Now these aren't super mysterious. We can use some basic shapes to create these. Let's go ahead and change our layer first, L-A-Y-E-R, and the layer we want is eye fixed clear.
Let's find that eye fixed clear, double click, make it the current layer, and let's start with a turn radius. A turn radius is a 60-inch circle that gives us room to turn around 180 degrees if we're in a wheelchair. Let's go ahead and type the circle command, and we'll click one time in the middle of the restroom, click and pull our cursor away.
Now for a 60-inch diameter circle, we need to type 30 inches for the radius, and click enter. And there it is. That looks pretty good.
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Now we have other clear spaces in the restroom. For example, we have this clear space already drawn around the door. It's the pull side of the door, meaning the door pulls towards us.
We have 60 inches clear all the way back, and 18 inches clear to the right of the door. Now there are all sorts of rules about clear spaces, which we won't get into, but we're learning the basic AutoCAD shapes. So circle for their turn radius.
This is a P line to kind of create this clear space around the door. Let's create the third type, which is a rectangle. And the rectangle we want to create is a clear space in front of a vanity.
Now the rules are a little bit looser for a remodel, which this is, but let's do the full clear space as if it's new construction. That full clear space is a rectangle that's 30 × 52. So the command we need is rectangle, enter.
And we want to click a point, maybe just kind of up by the door, click and pull it down and away. And it's 30 inches wide, hit TAB, and then 52 inches long, and enter. And there it is, we have our clear space in front of the vanity.
Now it's not lined up very well yet, so let's select it and type in M for move, and click right here at the midpoint, and move it to the midpoint of the front of the vanity. Now this clear space is allowed to slide under the vanity. Why is that? It's because we have a wall-mounted vanity.
So you can imagine here, my knees, my feet might be able to go under the vanity, and there can be some overlap. We'll select this and we'll move it down with ortho turned on, one foot two inches, enter. And there it is, that looks pretty good.
We can also copy this clear space over to our trash can. So let's do that, we'll select it, CO to copy, we'll grab that midpoint right there, and that same clear space can be recycled up here at the vanity. Click, and there it is.
So in a nutshell, they are simply AutoCAD shapes to create those clear spaces. And then we can go ahead and add labels. So let's change our layer again, layer, and we'll change it to up at the top of our list, A Anno Note.
Double click, that's the current layer now. And we'll type in the text command and we'll click right here, right here for this clear space. Click and move our cursor to the right and click again.
Now we'll get a pretty big text, that's okay. It's 30 × 52, it's pretty huge. And we'll just click away to exit that.
Let's select it now and type in properties. That brings up a properties window if it wasn't already opened up. The height is really huge, four foot five.
Let's drop that all the way down to four inches, enter, and there it is, our 30 × 52 clear space. Let's go ahead and copy that down to our turn radius. I'm going to turn off my ortho and we'll put it right here in the turn radius.
And I didn't put inches there, we don't always have to, just put 30 × 52, or we can put inches. Let's double click, change this out for 60 inches, and there's our 60 inch label for that turn radius. And with that, our enlarged restroom plan is looking good with those ADA clear spaces added.
