Creating Kitchen Elevations in AutoCAD by Extracting and Projecting Floor Plan Views for Clarity

This is so exciting. Now we will start our kitchen elevations, and drawing the elevations really shows visually what's going on inside of our proposed design. Our first step is to download the residential kitchen elevations pdf from the class, then open it up.

It looks something like this, and it shows us our goal for our kitchen elevations. Now let's go back to AutoCAD. For the kitchen elevations, we're going to take a more traditional approach.

We're going to begin in our model tab. So let's all go there to our model tab. Now we're seeing a lot going on in our model now.

We have all this information layered onto our floor plans. Not a problem. We're going to use a method where we take a copy of our kitchen and pull it out to create our elevations.

So how we select this is pretty important. We want to zoom in right around the kitchen, and we want to draw a box right around the kitchen that includes everything, all the way to our pantry. It's going to click one time above this upper left corner of the kitchen, kind of out here in space.

I'll click one time, then I'll move my cursor down to the right, all the way down to this pantry wall. Once I'm kind of out here, I'd say to the right of this pantry window and a little above, I will click, and all of that is selected. Now we'll do CO to copy.

CO, enter. I will click one time and move my cursor straight up. I like to leave ortho turned on, and I like to pick a nice round dimension.

Why is that? That's because if I accidentally miss something and need to bring it back up again, I can just move it a dimension that I can remember. So I will select 50 feet and enter. Now I don't need to keep copying this kitchen, so for now I will hit escape, and here it is.

It's a total copy. If I delete something, like I will grab that note right there, and I will click delete, it doesn't mess up our floor plan. It doesn't mess up any of our sheets, because it's just a copy.

All right, so let's zoom in close to that copy, and let's delete a few things we don't need. We don't need our dimensions, so we'll manually select and delete our dimensions. We also don't need our keynotes, so we'll delete all of the above.

All of the dimensions, all of the keynotes. We also don't need our room names. We know this is the kitchen, and we'll keep going with that.

Dimensions and keynotes gone. We also don't need our demolition information, so delete out these dashed lines and doors. We definitely don't need them at this point.

Just a few more to go here, a little tiny one there. We don't have to be perfect with this, but it is nice to keep it super clean. Okay, so our goal is something like this.

I've got a couple more demolition lines there and there, and I think we're good. That looks pretty clean to me. It's just our kitchen floor plan.

We are missing this back wall, and I've got one more demo line to remove, so I'll delete that demo line. This back wall isn't super critical, and it didn't copy because it's super long. It keeps going, so I think we're fine with what we've got.

Maybe this one porch column can go. Delete. All right, so what layer are we going to work on? Let's go ahead and go to our layers.

We'll type in L-A-Y-E-R, and the layer we want is actually shown here on our kitchen elevations. It's A-Wall-LF for elevation, so we'll scroll up A-Wall-LF. Double click and set that as the current layer.

Okay, we want to make sure ortho is turned on, and what we're going to do is essentially project from our kitchen plan into an elevation. We'll type in the word line, L-I-N-E, and we'll start with this back wall. I'll zoom in right to this interior corner of the back kitchen wall.

Click one time, move my cursor up, and let's go ahead and go five feet. A nice round number, and click enter. So that's five feet up.

Okay, then I'll click escape, and we'll do that again. Line, L-I-N-E. Now we'll project this right interior corner.

Click one time and go up, type five feet, and enter. Now let's go across and connect the dots. Click, and now we'll go up, and we'll go nine feet, enter.

That is the height of our ceiling. Do you start to see it yet? Maybe not yet. Let's do another one.

I'll hit escape, line, and I'll click right here, go up nine feet, and then go to the left, and click the top of the other nine foot line, and click, hit escape. What have we created? We have created a rectangle. Here is the floor.

Here is the right wall, left wall, and ceiling line. And it's this elevation right here. It's the hearth wall elevation of our kitchen.

Now we don't need these little lines. They were just there to create the projection. We will select them and click delete.

Pretty good. That is the shape of that back wall. Let's do the left wall now, which is the door wall elevation.