Creating Effective Residential Demolition Plans Using AutoCAD and Layer Management Techniques

Now it's time to create our demolition plans. And to begin, we're going to download from the course, the Residential Demolition Plans PDF. And this is a guide to help see where all of the demolition is happening in our plans.

So I'm going to open that up right here, and I'll have it side by side with AutoCAD to use as a guide as we go through this. So what is a demolition plan? Essentially, a demolition plan tells the contractor which walls, windows, doors, countertops get removed as part of the renovation process. So let's go in our AutoCAD projects to our model.

And we're looking at our floor plans. Let's begin by zooming into our first floor plan and zooming in right on the kitchen area. And we'll do the same over here in our PDF.

We'll zoom in just a little bit to this kitchen area to see it more clearly. Now what we want to do is move everything to a demolition layer. So what does that mean? Let's type in the word layer.

And that brings up all of our layers here in AutoCAD. And we can see that, I'm going to expand this a little bit if I can, we can see all of our layers. And we have certain layers that are demo layers.

For example, we have AAPPL. That's for A appliances, so kind of architectural appliances layer. But then we have an architectural appliances layer that is for demo, meaning it gets removed.

And it's set as a hidden line, which is a dashed line. And that's kind of a universal symbol for demolition or removal. So let's go ahead and jump in and do that.

I'm going to start by selecting the edge of the countertop, these lines. And then we'll type in properties. That brings up the properties window.

And we'll see which layer it is currently set to. Right now it's set to a case existing tops. We're trying to find a different layer that kind of makes sense.

I'm going to make this bigger. My properties windows make it easier to see. So a case and case stands for casework.

And we want to find one that stands for demo. So simply a case demo. We'll go ahead and do that.

And we can close down our properties and hit escape. And it's done. And you might notice, well, it's not a dashed line like we're seeing in the plan.

But if we zoom in pretty close, we'll notice indeed it is a dashed line. And that's because we are set to a one-to-one view. So the dashes are pretty small in this view.

But that's okay. We're going to go ahead and continue on. I'm going to click the upper cabinet line.

Type in properties. And you might kind of notice the pattern now. We're selecting items and then moving them to a demolition layer.

In this case, the casework demolition. Now that basically takes care of our countertop. Let's look at the sink here.

We'll select that. And we'll go to properties. It's on pfixed, which stands for plumbing fixtures.

All you do is swap it out for pfixed demo. And now it's on that correct layer. So the demo layer, zoom in, you'll see it's kind of a dashed line.

All right. We already talked about the appliances. Let's go ahead and make that change.

We'll click on this refrigerator. Go to properties. And we're going to go ahead and change that layer.

Right now it's a appliance existing. And we just want it to go to a appliance demo. Now I'm going to go ahead and leave this properties window up.

I'm going to stretch it so it fits a little better on the screen now. There we go. Something like that to move a little bit quicker as we go along.

Now we're going to start in on this lower section. We've got a closet door and the pantry door and the bedroom door that all get demolished. So I can select all of these line work items.

And I'll notice in the properties window they're set to a door existing. I want to move those to a door demo. Perfect.

Now I've got some walls to move to the demo layer. So I'll notice that it's not perfect. For example, this wall right here in plan has a continuous line.

But it's actually I don't want to demo all of this. I want to just demo up to the perpendicular wall. So how do I do that? First, I have to go and trim or split the wall.

So what I like to do is go ahead and draw a construction line. So I'll just draw a line. I need to change my layer to the correct layer.

So I'll start with layer again. Type in the word layer. And then I'll go to the wall.

A wall and demo. I'll double click on that layer name. A wall demo to make it the current layer.