How to Draft Bifold and Garage Doors Accurately in a Floor Plan Using AutoCAD Techniques

Let's work on our bifold doors and our garage door. Let's start on this bifold door right here.

Now, when I'm talking about these closet doors, you've probably seen them before. It's four vertical panels, and the two panels on the left and the two panels on the right are connected with a reverse hinge so that when you pull, the door opens towards you, but the midpoint, the door here, slides to the left and slides to the right. If this door was completely open, it would look something like this, and I'm going to copy this here and copy these here.

The door would look like this if completely open, and when completely closed, the door would look like this. However, you can see on the handout that we like to show these doors at a 45-degree angle. That represents, again, just like these pocket doors, their motion.

We can't really draw door swings for bifold doors because the swings get very, very confusing because of all the moving parts. So, what is the size of one of these door pieces? Well, first, let's remember what our total width is. I'll use my quick measure.

We can see that it's five feet total, so what we need to do is five feet divided by four, and that's a distance of one feet, three inches, and the rectangle we want to draw can be drawn at a 45-degree angle, but I always like to draw my rectangles orthographically along the coordinate system and then rotate them into place. I'll go rectangle. This is my hinge point.

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D, enter. Now, we can do either a vertical or horizontal rectangle. We'll be rotating it either way.

In this case, I'll do 1.5, enter, and one foot three, enter. I'll click to place it positive, positive. Now, we want to rotate this down and to the right 45 degrees.

Rotate. I'll select my rectangle, enter to lock it in from the hinge point, and I'll show with polar on a 315-degree angle and click. Now, the important thing to remember about this is the hinge for the next piece is this part all the way on the far right.

So, let's go mirror, choose my rectangle, enter to lock it in. It's going to be the point on the far right, and I'll drag a vertical line and click. We do not want to erase our source objects.

I will go N, enter for no, and now we can copy these two rectangles again from this far right point all the way over to the end point here. Enter to say that we're done. All right.

Now, this closet opening, if we use quick measure, is also five feet. So, we can simply copy this geometry into place and rotate it around. So, let's grab these four rectangles, copy.

I'm going to copy from this hinge point here to this hinge point here. Enter to lock it in. Now, I'll rotate these four objects, enter from the same point, and I'll show a vertical direction of 90 degrees to rotate those into place.

Okay. This closet is a little different. Using quick measure, I can see that it's only a four feet gap, but that math makes it very easy to draw these door segments in.

Four feet divided by four is one foot. I'll go rectangle. This time, I'll start at the top, and I'll do, in this case, D, enter for dimension, one feet, enter, 1.5, enter.

I'll show this negative quadrant and click, and then I'll go rotate, select my rectangle, enter to lock it in, the end point here, and this time I'm showing 45 degrees, and click. Mirror the object from this bottom end point. I'll show a zero degree angle and click, and enter.

We want to keep both objects. Copy two rectangles from this point to this point. Enter to say that I'm done.

Let's do a zoom extents and control S to save. Finally, we have two more doors, some specialty doors. These are our garage doors.

For now, we're just going to focus on the doors themselves, and then we'll talk about those dashed lines and the door operator geometry in a minute. For now, these are also going to be 1.5 inches thick, and they're going to overlap on both sides of the wall by two inches. Now, if I measure with quick measure, I can see that these are eight feet wide openings, so our rectangles are going to be 1.5 inches tall by eight feet and four inches wide.

Now, the first point I want to draw is actually right here, and that's two inches to the left of that end point. We know that we can use tracking to find that point. Let's go rectangle, specify first corner point.

It'll be TRA, enter for tracking. I'll choose here, show to the left, 2, enter, enter to say I'm done tracking. Now, I want to use D, enter for dimensions, 8 feet 4, enter, 1.5, enter.

I'll click my positive, positive quadrant, and there we go. We've drawn one of the doors. Now, before I copy over to this side, I'd like to draw the rest of that geometry, and then we can copy the whole door at once.

The rest of this geometry is fairly simple. We can see on the handout that it is a 7 foot 6 distance from the end point here up, then over 8 feet 4, then back down. Let's draw that with some lines.

I'll go line from the end point here. I'll show up with polar on, 7 feet 6 inches, enter, to the right, 8 feet 4, that's the same width as our garage door, and then back down, 7 feet 6, enter, enter to say that I'm done. We can also see that there's a track here, and that represents the chain or the pulley that would pull the garage door open.

This is opening the garage door above our heads when we're standing in the garage. It's going to use the midpoint here, and it's going to go 6 inches past the midpoint here. Well, we know that this is 7 feet 6, so this line will be 8 feet long.

I'll go line from the midpoint here. I'll show up and type 8 feet, enter, enter to say that I'm done. Now, this needs to be offset to the left and to the right 1 inch each, but before we do that, let's draw the rectangle that's going to go up here.

Then we'll use a point-to-point move to put it in the right place. Rectangle, I'll click anywhere to start, D, enter for dimensions, 1 feet, enter, and 1 feet 6, enter. I'll click to place, and now I can move point-to-point from the midpoint here to the endpoint here.

I'll move my rectangle, enter to lock it in, from the midpoint here to the endpoint here. Finally, we can now offset this line to the left and to the right 1 inch. I'll go O, enter for offset, 1, enter, once to the right, and once to the left, enter to say that I'm done.

Now, I'll zoom in, pick that middle line, and hit delete. Now, you'll notice that this is a dashed line representing overhead geometry. In this case, let's find a good dashed line.

You can see here that we have a hidden line already loaded into our drawing. Let's select all of this geometry and choose hidden. Now, you'll notice a very, very small dashed line.

That's okay. We haven't set our line type scale. So, let's type in LTscale and enter a new factor of 48, enter, and there we go.

These are hidden lines using a scale factor of 48 for our LTscale. To end the video, let's select all of this geometry with a crossing window. Don't forget the door itself, and let's go copy from the endpoint on the outside of the door here to the endpoint on the outside of the door here.

Enter to say we're done, zoom extents, and control S to save. All right. We are completely done with our doors and windows, and we will continue with the floor plan in the next video.

See you there.