Creating a Doorwall Elevation with Countertops and Cabinets Using Section Profiles in AutoCAD

Now let's create the countertop and cabinets for our doorwall elevation. So in our pdf, our kitchen elevations pdf, we want to take a look at elevation number one, our doorwall elevation. First off, we'll notice it has a scale which is one half an inch equals one foot.

Now we haven't been working in that scale. So far we've done everything in one quarter inch. So back in AutoCAD, let's go ahead and change our scale to one half inch equals one foot.

Why is that? That's because everything we create, we want to create in that half inch scale. So let's go ahead and change our scale. We'll notice that our dashed lines, everything kind of changes and that's okay.

That's what we want temporarily while we're working on these elevations. Number two, we have to imagine for a moment that we're occupying this kitchen. Imagine that we're standing right here and I'm just going to put a circle to represent us in the plan.

You don't have to draw this just for conversation. Imagine that's you and me standing right there in the kitchen and we're looking directly at this wall that has a door on it. That's why it's the door wall elevation.

We're looking at that wall and what do we see? We see on the left a door right there. And then we see these wall cabinets that's represented by this dashed line. And then we see base cabinets, but we only see the base cabinets to this point because at that point these back wall cabinets take over.

But we can't see them because we're kind of cutting a section looking through them. So imagine a line right here. This line goes right across and at this point we can't really see anything.

It's just a section of the cabinets. And that is what is represented here. We have a profile outline of those back wall cabinets and we could draw like the shelves and everything inside the drawer, but it's easier and kind of clearer typically to just put in a hatch pattern to show that we've cut through that cabinet.

All right, so with our brains in gear, imagining that we're in the kitchen looking at that wall, let's get to it. I'm going to find that elevation here in AutoCAD and I'm going to draw that profile first. Let's go to layer, l-a-y-e-r, and I want to look for this layer called a-sect for section, dash prof for profile.

This is a bit of a stretch, but a section profile. Double click to make that the current layer. So you want to see current layer a-sect prof. Close that up.

We're going to draw some extra lines to get this to work out. We'll type in the line command and make sure that ortho is turned on down here. I'm going to click one time in the exact bottom right corner, click, move my cursor to the right, and how far do I go? It doesn't really matter.

Just go a straight line to the right and click. Now I'll go up to the top of my counters, which is 36 inches, and enter. Now this part is critical.

I want to go straight back to my elevation and when I get to this vertical line, I want to make sure I see the perpendicular snap. When I do, I'll click one time and now I'm actually drawing my elevation and this countertop. So I'm going to move my cursor to the left.

What is the standard depth of a countertop? We know the base cabinets are 24 inches deep, but the actual countertop, if we get to the nitty-gritty, it's usually about 25 and a half inches so that it can overlap the base cabinets. So the counter is a little bit wider than the cabinets below it. We'll type that in 25.5 inches and enter.

Now we want to draw that little lip, that little overhang, and it's about a half an inch, or I'm sorry, one and a half inches. So to do that, we'll type 1.5 inches, straight down, then move our cursor straight to the right and type in 1.5 inches, enter. Perfect.

Now we will go straight down and this is important again. We want to go to perpendicular right on the floor and click. All right, that looks pretty good.

Now we also need a toe kick right here. So I'm going to go straight vertical up again and type 4 inches, 4 inch toe kick, and click enter. And then go straight to the right, 4 inches, enter.

And then go down perpendicular, click and escape. There it is. I've got the profile, but you're asking yourself, why does it look kind of funny? That's because we have some extra lines.

So all these lines outside the elevation were just for spacing. We'll select them and click delete. Now our toe kick has an extra line there, so we will use the trim command, tr, enter, and trim out those 4 inches of extra line.

Okay, so that's it. We've got our profile. Now we could draw the doors and drawers inside of this, like imagine cutting through it, but that can be a bit tedious and maybe not super helpful.

So in this case, we will just draw a diagonal pattern in there. And that's pretty common, some kind of just hatch pattern to show that we're cutting a section through that counter and cabinet. So let's change our layer.

First of all, we'll type in layer, l-a-y-e-r, enter. And here we go. We're going to go now to change our layer, and the layer we want is a pat for pattern, and then dash lf for elevation.

We'll double click there, and our current layer now says a pat elevation. Close that. Now we'll type in the word hatch, h-a-t-c-h, and we want to change our options over to ANSI 31.