Finishing Exterior Walls

Tip #5: When drawing walls, note that the length of the wall displays in the status bar (at the bottom of the screen). This is useful for giving us a general idea of the size while we are roughing things in. When it comes to making things more precise, we'll use the Accurate Move tool and dimension lines to position our walls exactly where we want them.

So, remembering to draw walls in a clockwise direction, let's draw a basic outline our our house. Personally, I like the general shape and possibilities of the "L-Stairs" design, so we will proceed with that. Of course, you can do whatever kind of layout you like.

Let's start a the lower left hand corner of the garage with the Exterior Wall tool selected, and draw a wall downward. But, of course the status display doesn't show us an accurate length. Never mind. If you pull the wall to the side (so it's not straight with the wall above it) you will see the actual length. Go about 3', align the wall vertically, then stop. Ahem. When we let go of the mouse, we note that the wall seems to be backward from what we expected (with the "outside" showing on our left). Don't fret, we will fix this "problem" soon, because of course we need to change the left hand wall of the garage to an interior wall. Once we do that, we can turn out wall around and everything will be fine. Sorta.

OK, now draw a wall (starting at the south end of our new wall) and go about 15' west (to the left) then go back north 3' more or less in line with our south garage wall. And yes, these walls are also backward. The program is trying to be smart and do what it thinks we want it to do, even though we really want these walls to face out. It just doesn't know which side is "out", yet.

So, before we go on, let's fix these problems. First, go to the toolbar and select the Wall tool. You will notice a child toolbar appears, with all the various wall tools. On the toolbar you will see a tool that looks like a wall with a jagged "S" going through it. In the image above there's a "Break Wall" label just below this tool. Select the Break Wall tool and click in the junction between the south garage wall and the west garage wall, right where the arrow and circle are. You will see a short horizontal line through the vertical wall. This breaks the west garage wall into 2 walls, each of which may be independently manipulated, something we're going to do right now. But first, click on the mouse arrow tool (the Object Select tool) to turn off Break Wall mode.

Tip #6: By convention, HomeDesigner uses a series of "specification dialog boxes" for every object type in the system. They all work basically the same way. Select the object and click on the Open Object tool.

Objects are selected by first selecting the "Select Object" tool (the mouse arrow tool on the left-hand side of the tool bar). When there are several objects overlapping or very near each other, use the TAB key to cycle through all the objects in an area until the one you want is selected.

When attempting to select an edge line, click as near to the line's center point as possible, and if necessary, use the TAB key to cycle through objects until the line you want is selected.

Now, click on the section of garage wall above the break you just inserted (the longer part of the west garage wall). Then click on the Open Object tool icon to open the Wall Specification dialog box. Click on the Wall Types tab and select "Interior-4" for the Wall Type. This is shown below. Now, click OK to see the effect of the change.

You should see something like the image, below.

Press the SHIFT key and select the 3 new walls, so we can reverse their direction. Click on the Open Object tool and open the Wall Specification dialog box for these walls. Switch to the General tab and click the Flip Layers check box, then click OK.

So, our walls are reversed, and we're ready to draw the remainder of the first floor (at least the exterior walls). Go west about 8', then north about 5'6", then west again about 14'. Go north from there, drawing the west wall of our house about 24', then east about 14'. Draw north about 3', (don't worry about lining up this wall with the wall below it, just yet) then east about 23' until you are over the west wall of the garage. Draw down now to complete the exterior of our house, and select the Object Select tool, thus turning off Wall mode.

You should now have something like the image, above, and are now ready to click Next, below, to learn the secrets of the universe.

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