Placing and Adjusting Fixtures in Floor Plans Using Blocks, Layers, and Precise Positioning Techniques

In this video, let's continue bringing in our fixtures. I'm going to change my current layer back to AFixed, and I'm going to zoom in on the laundry room area.

Now, before we do the laundry room, I want to focus on this furnace. Let's go I-Enter to open up our blocks palette, and we can see that we have a furnace DWG. Again, this is fairly representative, but we can bring it in nonetheless.

I'll click the furnace, and Shift-Right-Click mid-between two points. This fits nicely right in the middle between this endpoint and this endpoint. Excellent.

Control-S to save. Now we can bring in our refrigerator, which might be a freezer or something. It's the secondary fridge in this location here.

I'll hit the fridge, and I'll bring it in. Shift-Right-Click mid-between two points between here and here, and then I'll click the grip to make it hot. Right-click rotate, and this is 90 degrees.

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There we go. Now I'll move down here and look at my clothes washer and clothes dryer. Now both of these are going to come in at a rotation angle of 270, and I'm going to click the clothes washer first, and I'm not going to place it perfectly in the right spot.

Instead, I'm going to choose the midpoint. Now, why did I choose the midpoint? Well, I'm going to move it up a certain distance away from the midpoint. So I'll choose it, go move, and I'll move it up a distance of 1 foot 8. Enter.

1 foot 8. Now we might adjust this later on. I just want to make sure that the clothes washer and dryer are the same distance away from the midpoint. Let's go to the clothes dryer next.

Again, I'll choose the midpoint, grab the clothes dryer and move. Again, this is a distance in direction. I'm showing the down direction.

1 foot 8. Enter. And we can see they're a little far apart. So I'll grab the dryer and move it back up 3 inches.

I'll grab the washer and move it down 3 inches. Perfect. We could always move those around more if we needed to on our floor plan, but I like where those are for now.

Now if we look at this fridge, we can see that it's intersecting with the door. And this is the fridge that is going to be used in the kitchen as well. But in this case, I'd like to shrink this and make it a little smaller just for this room.

So I'm going to grab this fridge block and explode it. Now notice when we exploded this fridge, it came in on layer 0. All of the blocks you may have noticed in our blocks palette have been drawn on layer 0. They look like the A fixture geometry because remember layer 0 is our chameleon layer. It reacts to what layer you're placing something on.

Or if you're bringing in something that is on another layer already, you want to place it on layer 0. Layer 0 is really useful for bringing in blocks. Now that these are all on layer 0, I want to select them and change them to A fixed. And now we can do stretch.

We'll go stretch. I'll start right here and stretch up across. It's okay that we're intersecting with that arc.

It has no endpoint grips that we're going to connect with. Enter to lock it in. And I'll stretch this back for enter for a nice shallow freezer.

All right. Control S to save. There's one more thing that we forgot to do.

And it's the shelf above the washer and dryer. We can see it here. It's a dashed line.

In fact, it has a hidden line type. And it's going to come out 12 inches from the wall. Let's go O, enter for offset, 12, enter.

Bring the wall line out, enter. Now we can match property to this center 2 line. We'll do match properties.

But then I want to grab it, migrate it to the A fixture layer, and then change it to the hidden line type. So why did we match properties at all? Well, remember, the properties for this line say that it is 0.25 line type scale. And I knew this one needed to also be 0.25 line type scale.

So I quickly matched the property to make that property the same. Then I edited the other properties. Now this is on A fixture with a hidden line type.

But the line itself has a line type scale of 0.25. Now we can focus on the kitchen. And you'll notice we have a kitchen layout.dwg in our plan blocks folder. We're not going to be spending time laying out the kitchen one element at a time.

And this is a fairly standard workflow. You may have noticed that all of our tubs and toilets came in relatively in the same location. This is a common occurrence in many floor plans, especially if you're doing many of the same types of buildings, houses, or commercial.

And you can group blocks together in nested blocks. So let's see what that means. I'm going to go and change my current layer to layer 0. And let's change our rotation back to 0 before we grab our kitchen layout.

Now I'll grab the kitchen layout.dwg. And I'll place it in the bottom corner here. Now, there's no surprise that this fits perfectly into our drawing. But it's important to note that you can make standard block collections or nested blocks that fit in relatively well.

And then you can explode that block, which we'll do now. I'll grab this block and hit explode. And then we can edit this block by stretching or deleting or adding elements.

But you've already got a good first step. Now, this is interesting. Our fridge came in on layer 0. Let's migrate that to the A fixture layer.

Zoom extents and Control-S to save. The only thing left is not technically a fixture. It's our tile hatch, which is in front of our fireplace.

And we will work on that in the next video. I'll see you there.