Learn the meticulous process of designing restrooms and service rooms in architectural planning. This article provides an in-depth explanation of how to measure and adjust dimensions, create duplicate rooms, and effectively layout space while taking into account potential modifications.
Key Insights
- When designing duplicate rooms such as restrooms, it is essential to work on both simultaneously, ensuring that their dimensions are accurately mirrored.
- Understanding the dimension of each element is crucial, for instance, a clearance of six feet is required from wall to wall to accommodate door clearances. This knowledge greatly aids in efficient space planning.
- The use of architectural tools such as locking constraints on dimensions aids in making large changes without disrupting the entire floor plan. It is an effective method to maintain the relationship between various dimensions while allowing for one dimension to be modified.
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To create the restrooms, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and delete this dimension because we don't need it anymore. But I'm going to rough in where we would have our vestibule. So I'll bring this across.
And I know this dimension will be about five and a half feet or so and then down. And this gives me something to kind of work from here. And if I were to take this dimension from the Center Line to the face of the Wall, I know that I'm going to need about six feet from Wall to Wall here to get the door clearances in for each one of those.
If I make this about three feet, then I know that we should be able to get this to fit. And then this wall isn't necessarily set exactly where we want it at this point in time. We'll want to keep that in mind as well.
But our restroom is going to adjust a little. We want to make sure we get the size that we need and we get this all set up the way we want it. So I'm going to delete that dimension.
And then I'm going to take this one and I'm going to mirror this wall. This is our new Center Line here. And then if I trim this, and then I can drag this wall back.
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That kind of gives me an idea of what our vestibule could look like with our restrooms in this type of space. And what's important is that since this was an arbitrary line, that if we make any adjustments to this dimension, this needs to be our Center Point at this location here. And so what I want to do is I'm going to look at this and I'm going to say, okay, this dimension here needs to be roughly the same on both sides, and it needs to be at least five feet.
And so what I could do is I could take this down and I could take, say from here. And if I were to move this down three and a half feet, that gives me five feet two roughly. And then if I did the same thing here and moved it down three and a half feet, you can see now I'm starting to get the shape of a restroom with some sinks over here and back wall.
And so when you try to create duplicate rooms, like I am here, you want to make sure that you're working on them both at the same time. And so for this project, what we want to do is we want to make sure that if we were to just stick with our easy center-to-center dimensions, we want to have about six and a half feet total from center to center, and that'll give us the right dimension that we're looking for. If I were to go ahead and add that extra foot here, um, then I need to make sure to do the same thing on the bottom.
If I made this 6.5, now we need to add a foot to this whole thing here. And what I'll do is I'll make a dimension. And one of the things that always comes up when we're working on this type of thing is I want to adjust this dimension, but have it move all of these things at the same time.
And so what I could do is I could extend this dimension here. I want this relationship to stay the same, and I want this relationship to stay the same. So this three feet and three feet and this six feet six, those all need to stay the same, but I want this dimension to modify.
And so a trick that we can do is we can actually Lock Constraints on all three of these dimensions here. And then if I want this value to be six feet six, meaning I want to move this wall and all of these ones go with it, then I can pick this wall now because this is locked, this is locked, and this is locked as evidenced by all the locked padlock icons here. And that means you can see these dimensions aren't blue because they're not going to change.
But I can go in and I can change this value to six feet six or six and a half feet, and it'll move the entire thing and give me that dimension. And so this is a helpful tool when you're doing space planning like we are right now, because then you're not having to redo stuff, and you're also giving yourself the opportunity to make these types of big changes without messing up your entire floor plan. Now, the important step is to go back and either unlock these constraints and delete the dimension or continue working with the understanding that you do have those Lock Constraints on, and that could have an impact on how your plan works going forward.
The next thing I'm going to do here is I'm just going to align this. So I'm going to align this Face with this one because we want to have a clean core going through there. And now we have the ability to start working on our restroom.
We're going to have an elevator right here, and then we'll have those two service rooms right in this area.
