Adding Doors and Windows: A Step-by-Step Guide

These next few videos we're going to go ahead and add the doors and the windows to the project. We're going to start with doors on level one. Doors are pretty straightforward as you know because we added a few for project one, but there's still a few more tricks that we want to make sure we we understand.

We did it a little differently in that one because there wasn't as many walls to to navigate, so there's a couple of things that I want to go over before we add all the doors. First off, when we place the door, as you recall, depending on which side of the wall we favor is which way it's going to swing, and then if we want to change the hinge side of it, we can go ahead and hit spacebar at this point in time to change it, or we can do it after we place it with the toggle arrows. What I really wanted to point out here is that we have the option to place the door relative to the center line of the wall and the center line of the door, and so in our case we're going to want to use two feet as that standard dimension.

Now, what's unique for this project is we're going to have a lot of doors as we make our way down this wall here, and then we'll have a few down through and into the restrooms as well, and so what we'll want to do is make sure that we've placed them in the right location, and then also we're going to be able to copy all of these doors from level one up to level two with no problem. So the first two doors I'm going to place here on the right side are going to be for these two offices here, and if I place, say, this one at the right location where I want it, then what I could do is I can use again that mirror pick access tool by selecting the door first, and remember to get out of those commands we want to always just be hitting escape twice, and that brings you kind of back to ground zero, but to get back into it I'll select the door, hit mirror pick axis, and I'm just going to use the center line of the wall to place the door. Now, I'm going to want two doors, one going into this office here and another one going into here, and so I can essentially do the same thing but use grid line two as my mirror point.

If I were to select door one and the door two here, I can use the mirror pick axis again, select grid line two, and then now you'll notice these two are already selected, so that means we can continue that process and use grid line three as our pick axis. So pick the tool, mirror pick axis, select grid line three, and then we were easily and very quickly able to place all six of those doors without any issue. We'll go ahead and place the doors in this location here, and if you remember we briefly touched on it, but we can use that create similar tool by right clicking on the door, picking create similar, and then I can place the doors using that same constraint of two feet that we talked about before.

So I'll have another one here, put another one on the south side of this room, one going into the stairwell, and then I'll add one leaving the building here, and leaving the building here. For this room, we're going to add a double door, and so when we add double doors, what we have to do is we have to load that family. If I activate the door command by using keyboard shortcut D R, we can do load family, and we're going to use this US imperial library doors, and we can go ahead and look for the door that we're looking for.

Learn Revit

• Nationally accredited
• Create your own portfolio
• Free student software
• Learn at your convenience
• Authorized Autodesk training center

Learn More

So you can see there's a bunch in the folder here, and then there's also a breakdown of residential and commercial doors. The general ones that we're going to use a lot are typically located in here, like this door single flush is the type we've been using. If we were looking for a door, like door double glass, which is actually the one we want, it's going to be in here, but you can go even a layer deeper, and you can see that there's some that are either exterior or standard doors, but they have a little bit more options because they're going to have some of the hardware built in.

For our purposes, this double glass is going to do just fine. When we have doors that have multiple types loaded, a lot of times you'll see it pop up with a type catalog, and this is great because it allows you to load in only the door types that you're going to use, so you're not cluttering your model with a handful of types that you're never going to use. And so our case, we're going to grab this 72 × 84, and then I'm going to place the door in the center of that room.

Now that I have all the doors placed on level one, what I could do is I could select the interior doors because the exterior doors aren't going to do us any good on level two, and I'm going to use that filter command again. Notice this time when I made that selection, I used the window option, and I did that because it's just easier for me to visualize how those were going to get grabbed, but there's no reason I couldn't have used the crossing either because we're going to use filter to take out everything but doors, and then I can have them selected. Now this trick here allows you to take elements from one level, level one here, copy them to clipboard, and then we can go to level two, and I can actually use the paste aligned to current view, and it'll paste all those doors onto level two.

If we go into our 3D view real quick here, we can see that we now have doors on both level one and level two.