How to Stay Organized When Adding Interior Door Openings in Your Floor Plan Design Process

Efficient Techniques for Placing Interior Doors Without Missing Key Openings or Dimensions

This article offers a comprehensive guide to planning and executing interior door openings in architectural projects. It provides a step-by-step approach, ensuring the reader avoids common mistakes such as overlooking a door or window, or forgetting particular dimensions or symbols.

Key Insights

  • The article emphasizes the importance of not jumping around projects while planning interior door openings. A focused approach on one clump of rooms or following a navigation path clockwise or counterclockwise is recommended.
  • Techniques are provided for adding door openings, such as using the 'offset' command to manage door dimensions and the 'trim' command to extend or cut edges. Repeated use of these will help maintain consistency in architectural design.
  • While planning door openings, the advice is to consider the width, jam typical, and relative positions to walls. Specific instructions are given for two feet, four inches doors and two feet, six inches doors, which are frequently used in many projects.

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Let's continue with our interior door openings. Now there's no perfect way to plan out your interior door openings.

There's no perfect location to start clockwise, counterclockwise. The key in my opinion is just make sure you don't jump around your project. Focus on one clump of rooms or one navigation path clockwise or counterclockwise as you go.

Just don't jump around because you might forget a door or window or some other element here or there. The same applies to dimensions and symbols. So for now, let's zoom in on our kitchen, laundry room, and this front closet area.

And let's add our three door openings. There's going to be an opening here, here, and one in this front entryway closet. To begin, let's work on the door coming in from the garage.

That's a three-foot door. And the offset is from this wall of two feet, four and a half inches. O, enter.

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Two feet, 4.5. Enter. I'll grab this wall in and click. Enter to say I'm done.

Enter to go back in. Three feet, enter. We're going to use our extend trick using trim.

TR, enter. Holding shift, click, click. Releasing shift.

One, two, three, four. Let's go up here. Now, this one's a little easier because all we need is our three-inch jam, typical, and the door width.

The width of this door is two feet, six. So I'll go O, enter for offset. Three, enter for three inches.

Interior here. Enter to say I'm done. Enter to go back in.

And two feet, six is actually 30 inches. Three, zero inches. So I'll use 30, enter.

Click here and click here. There's a lot of two foot six doors in this project. So I'll be using 30 inches rather frequently.

I'll go TR, enter for trim. Shift to extend these two. And then release shift and trim out those four lines.

Enter to say that we're done. Now, let's take a look at this opening for the closet. This is a four foot wide opening.

And from this top edge, it is one foot and one inch. So let's go offset. One foot, one, enter.

From this point down and click. Enter to say I'm done. Enter to go back in.

Four feet, enter. Here to here. Enter to say I'm done.

Now, when we go trim, we want to select our trimming or cutting edges. TR, enter. T, enter for cutting edges.

I'll do a crossing window. Make sure I select all four of those objects. Enter to lock it in.

And here it jumps over this line because it's not being trimmed by that cutting edge. And then I'll use fence to clean that up. Zoom extends, control S to save.

Let's work on this section next. That's our bathroom and one of the guest bedrooms and closet. Two doors in this bathroom.

Both of these are going to use the three inch jam typical. And both of these doors are two feet, four inches. Offset, enter.

Three, enter. And I'll do both jams here and here. Enter to say I'm done.

Enter to go back in. Two feet, four, enter. Here to the right.

And here, down. TR, enter for trim. This time we're going to hold shift to extend here and here.

And here and here. Releasing shift, I'm still in trim. I can click to trim these out.

I'll use fence to trim that out and I'll trim those out as well. I'll do that trim one more time. TR, enter.

Holding shift, I'll extend one, two, three, four. Releasing shift, trim these lines out. I'll do a fence through those two.

Trim these twos out. I'll do a fence through those two. There we go.

Enter to say that we're done. In this guest bedroom, the door is two feet, six or 30 inches. And it uses this wall for its jam typical.

Offset, enter. Three, enter. Down.

Enter to say I'm done. Enter to go back in. 30 for our two foot six width.

Enter. This line down. Enter to say I'm done.

TR, enter. Holding shift to extend. Releasing shift to trim.

Enter to say I'm done. This one is only two foot four wide. We'll do offset, enter.

Three, enter for our jam. Here, down. Enter to say I'm done.

Enter to go back in. Two feet, four inches. Enter.

Here, down. Enter to say I'm done. TR, enter.

Shift for extend. Releasing shift to trim. Zoom extends.

Control S to save. In the next video, we will continue around the rest of our building with our interior door openings. I'll see you there.

photo of David Sellers

David Sellers

David has a Bachelor of Architecture Degree from Penn State University and a MBA from Point Loma Nazarene University. He has been teaching Autodesk programs for over 10 years and enjoys working and teaching in the architectural industry. In addition to working with the Autodesk suite, he has significant experience in 3D modeling, the Adobe Creative Suite, Bluebeam Revu, and SketchUp. David enjoys spending his free time with his wife, biking, hanging out with his kids, and listening to audiobooks by the fire.

  • Licensed Architect
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  • Autodesk Certified Professional: AutoCAD, Revit, Fusion 360
  • Adobe Visual Design Specialist
  • SketchUp Certified 3D Warehouse Content Developer
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