Develop proposed plans using AutoCAD, beginning with downloading the Residential Proposed Plans PDF. Master layer management and begin drawing your plans on top of your demolition plan, while ensuring layer cleanliness.
Key Insights
- The article elaborates on the usage of AutoCAD to develop residential remodeling plans, starting with downloading a proposed plan PDF.
- It explains how to efficiently manage layers in AutoCAD, including how to temporarily freeze some of your demolition work, to create a clean workspace for your proposed plans.
- The tutorial provides specific examples on how to draw walls, measure dimensions, and clean up wall intersections to present a clean and accurate proposed plan.
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This is so exciting! Now that we have completed our demolition plans, we can begin work on our proposed plans. Let's begin by downloading the file Residential Proposed Plans PDF from our course resources. Once we have it downloaded, we're going to open it up.
It looks something like this. It shows the proposed design for this residential remodel. Over in AutoCAD, let's jump down to our model tab.
Now, where are we going to draw these proposed plans? Let's draw them right here, right on top of our demolition plan. But first, we need to move a few things out of our way, so to speak. We'll do that through layer management.
So go ahead and type in the word layer and enter. That brings up our layers, and what we can do is temporarily freeze some of our demolition work. The first demolition layer is our ANO DIMMS demo.
We can't freeze it yet because it's the current layer, but you can go ahead and try and see the warning. You'll notice the current layer is set to that DIMMS demo layer. If we click this freeze icon, it's going to give us a warning and say close.
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We need to simply change the current layer. We know we're going to be drawing in some walls, so let's go ahead and change the current layer to our AWALL NEW. We'll double click and make sure it says current layer AWALL NEW right there at the top.
Now we can start at that top and we'll freeze some of the layers we don't need. So ANO DIMMS demo, we're going to freeze it. And then our Keynote demo, we'll freeze those.
They all go away. Notice how our plan is getting really clean as we go through these. We're going to go to A Appliance demo and freeze that as well.
And let's keep going. A Casework demo, we'll freeze that. A Case demo.
And let's go ahead and freeze AANO NOTE EXIST. Alright, so those are gone. Now we just have our walls and doors.
So A Door demo, we'll freeze that one. And then go down to our wall area, AWALL DEMO, and freeze that as well. Nice and clean, right? Let's go ahead and close our layer window.
And now we can start work on our first floor proposed walls. So in our PDF plan, if you have it open, go ahead and zoom in to see the dimensions, or feel free to print this page out. And we'll start in this Pantry Powder Room section.
Over in AutoCAD, we'll zoom into that same area. We'll zoom in nice and tight here. And we need to have this wall that basically cuts this pantry and powder room into two separate spaces.
We'll do that by starting with that dimension, 5'6". We'll type in our line command, and we'll click one time right behind this fireplace. I'll click right here on the endpoint of this wall.
I need to make sure Ortho is turned on, and I'll go straight up, and I'll type in my dimension, 5'6", and then click Enter. Then I'll draw straight to the right. Now, I want to make sure I get exactly there.
So a good snap to turn on is our perpendicular snap. We'll turn that on. I'm going to turn on midpoint as long as I'm here as well.
All right, so let's try that. Yep, there's the perpendicular. I'll click, and there is that wall.
Now, I'll notice in my PDF that that dimension is to the top line of that wall. How do I get the bottom line? Well, we know the dimension of the wall thickness is 6". But if we're not sure, we can always verify.
We could do DI on our keyboard for distance, and simply measure right there between two wall lines, and we see they're 6". We'll take this wall line that we drew. We'll do CO to copy it after we've selected it.
Click one time, drag our cursor down, and type in 6". That will create that wall thickness. Then we'll click Enter to wrap that up.
Now this first line that we drew doesn't exist in the floor plan. We just needed it to create this 5'6 dimension. We'll select it and click Delete.
Now we need to clean up our walls right here. They don't come together very clean right now, so we're going to use TR on our keyboard for trim. We can trim out right here this little section of wall, and these little bits of wall.
The idea would be that if we poured water between these wall lines, it would fill in all the space without getting blocked. Let's do that on the right side as well. We'll trim out that extra space.
That looks pretty good. Let's click Escape, select these wall remnant lines, and delete them. And there we go.
We've now drawn that center wall between the pantry and the powder room. So that looks pretty good. What other walls do we have that are new? We have these little wing walls in the So let's bump our way up there and draw those walls in as well.
Let's type in line, L-I-N-E, and we'll click and start with this first one. We start right here where our wall ends. Click one time, go to the left, 2'2", Enter.
And then the thickness here is different. It's not the same as all of our other walls. We're now dealing with an 8-inch thickness.
