Aligning Walls

Here's what we have, so far.

Here's what we want to do:

• We want the front garage wall and the wall across from the entry/stairs to be aligned.
• We want the two short vertical walls to the left to be aligned.
• We want to adjust some of the dimensions to be closer to our liking.

This will be our first introduction to CAD mode. I rarely used CAD mode when I first began designing houses. I'm not sure why, I guess it didn't seem useful or important. Then I discovered the Accurate Move tool, and in order to line things up "accurately" I needed guidelines. Literally, guide lines. Now, it seems the automatic thing to do, so this is what we will do.

Click on the draftsman's triangle in the toolbar. This is the CAD mode tool "toggle". This tool is on the toolbar in both modes, and switches between them when you click on it. F2 also switches modes, but I tend not to use it.

In CAD mode, let's click on the Line tool (an angled line that should be selected by default) and draw a horizontal line along the front edge of the southern garage wall. It probably won't exactly align with the front of the wall, but that's no problem because we're going to make it line up. Don't draw the line very far past the left edge of the garage wall, yet. Doing this will make it harder to align the line with the wall.

Click on the Select Object (the mouse arrow) tool in the toolbar, then click on the line to select it (it turns bright blue), and note that a toolbar appears (it's on the left on the screenshot, below).

Note that 3 "handles" appear on the line. One on either end, and one in the middle. The handles on the ends will let us extend the line in either direction. The handle in the middle will let us move the line perpendicular to its length. In this case, up and down.

Zoom in closely on the center handle. I mean really close.

Note the label at the left of the screen next to a yellow arrow. This is the Accurate Move tool. Click it, then click and hold on the center line handle (red box on the bright blue line) and drag the mouse in the direction we want the line to move. When the line aligns exactly with the bottom edge of the wall, let go.

Now zoom out so we can extend the left end of our line to the left so it goes past the wall we want to align. Click on the triangle to turn CAD mode off, and now zoom in on the wall.

Note the 5 handles on the wall in the image above. The end ones let us extend the wall and also change its direction. The 2 handles just inside these end handles let us offset the wall in very small increments. We won't use either of these handles. Wall offsets are rarely needed, and we don't need one now. Use the Accurate Move tool (shown on the left) in conjunction with the center wall handle to move the wall until it aligns exactly with the CAD line we drew. Zoom out.

We can delete the line, or if it's not bothering us, leave it in. You never know, it might be useful, later.

Now, select the Wall tool, then select the Interior Wall child tool, and draw an interior wall upward between the 2 short vertical walls. This is shown, below.

Note that the interior wall aligns automatically with the southern wall (where we started), but does not align at the northern end. No problem. Simply click on the wall (the green exterior wall at the top) and nudge it over to the right (or to the left) until it snaps into alignment with the interior wall.

The astute will note that we could have extended the wall at the bottom of the plan (the one we aligned with the CAD line) until it met the garage wall, which would have aligned it with the garage wall (actually, it would have joined the garage wall to become one long wall). Then, if we broke the long wall, we could pull the end back to where we wanted it and it would remain exactly colinear with the garage wall. We will use this technique later, because it can be quite useful to align walls.

Let's move on to filling in more interior walls.

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