Strategies for adding interior dimensions to a floor plan, including clockwise and counterclockwise tracking and methods for updating your progress. Understand how to navigate around potential obstacles, such as doors and windows, and how to enhance efficiency in your dimensioning process.
Key Insights
- When working through a floor plan, it's crucial to keep track of every change or update, either on a printed copy of a handout or a digital PDF.
- Adding dimensions to your plan can be accomplished in a variety of ways, such as linear dimensions for doors and vertical dimensions for room height. It is also possible to create long horizontal strings of dimensions for large sections of the plan.
- Efficiency can be enhanced by using multiple workflows and tools at once, such as the Linear Dimension tool, zoom extends, and saving controls.
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Now let's start on the interior dimensions. Like I said earlier, it doesn't really matter how you work through a floor plan like this.
You could do clockwise or counterclockwise, it's totally up to you. But please make sure that you keep track of what you're doing, either on a printed copy of one of the handouts or on a digital PDF. The key is to make sure that you keep track of everything that you're changing or updating as you go through a project like this.
So let's first zoom in on the garage, kitchen, and laundry room and add some dimensions there. First, let's look at the door here. I can go linear dimension, here to here, and I'll just place the short dimension away from the door.
Then we can do the door here, dim linear. I'll go here to here, dim continue, the width of the door, and the interior corner of the kitchen. Enter to say I'm done, escape, escape, escape.
Now there's a vertical dimension for the height of the room here, and one for this short wall. I'll go linear, here to here, and I'll hit ENTER to go back in, here to here. Escape, escape, escape.
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Now there is a long horizontal string of dimensions starting all the way over here, and it goes all the way through the hallway to this wall. Let's do that in a long continuous dimension string. I'll start with a linear dimension.
I'll choose the corner of this window and to the corner of the kitchen. I'll place the first dimension here. In fact, I'm going to grab it and move it up just a little higher.
You can see with my crosshairs, I want to clear the door over here. Right now, it's right in the middle of the door, but I want it to be just higher. Perfect.
Let's go continue, and this continues to the door, across the door. Then it's going to go to the opening of this door frame, across that door frame, then to this corner here, across there. This drops down to the exterior wall there, then up to the interior of this corner, then to the exterior corner here, and finally, we'll close on this door.
Enter to say that I'm done. Now we can see that I tried to clear the door there, but I ended up intersecting the door here. That's totally fine.
Now there's a couple ways we can stretch a long dimension string like this. Let's do a big stretch, but we're going to have to clean it up over here a little bit. I'll start here, going all the way across.
I don't want to cross over my door, so I'm just going to grab up to this point. Enter. I'm going to click an arbitrary point up here and just slide it down.
We're going to get close to both, so I'm going to move the five down below. There we go. Then over here on this five, six, and one-half inch, I'm going to grab that dimension, click the grip to make it hot, and just snap it into place with the rest.
Again, multiple workflows there, but it made it more efficient in the end. Zoom extends, Control-S to save. Let's zoom in over here.
We do want to add in some dimensions for this tile, so I'm going to go to the Home tab and just turn on my A-Wall Masonry layer. Let's go Linear Dimension, just for the width, and Linear Dimension for the depth of it away from the wall. While we're in this dining room area, I'll dimension this long wall, Linear Dimension, this corner to here, and that's 12'8".
Excuse me, it's 12'6". This door needs a dimension, so I'll do a Linear Dimension here to here, and I'll put it at the same height as this two-foot. I'm going to use L-A-Y Off, L-A-Y O-F-F, and click on my Masonry layer one more time, just to turn it off.
Now, that looks a little strange. The dimensions are floating in space, but that's okay. They're still connected to that hidden geometry.
I'll do a Zoom Extends, Control-S to save. Let's zoom in here and put the dimension on this door, Linear, here to here. There's my four-foot dimension, and I'll add one more Linear Dimension here to here, and snap it on that four feet.
Let's move to the left. Both of these doors need a dimension, so I'll go Linear, and when you're dimensioning doors like this, the dimension string itself can be fairly short, so there's 2'4". Another Linear Dimension, 2'4".
Let's drop down into this bedroom and do the same thing, Linear, 2'6", and then for the closet, this one is 2'4". In the next video, I want to come back and work on this, but let's hit these two short dimensions in this closet, Linear, from the interior corner to the door, 2'6", and one more, Linear, from the door to the door, also 2'6". Okay, let's do a Zoom Extends, Control-S to save, and we'll finish the dimensions on this side of the house in the next video.
I'll see you there!
