Roof on 1 1/2 story house

[csebasti]

I am remodeling my house and am trying to use Home Designer Suite 7.0 to see how the changes will look. I'm having trouble with the roof. The house is a one and a half story. I've attached a simplified floor plan of the second floor (that doesn't show the two rooms, just one large one). The two yellow walls are kneewalls, but I can't get the roof to build properly as you can see in the other image.

I've set the gable walls, knee walls, attic space...

I can't figure out what I'm missing. As I've been messing around with this, the roof just keeps doing weird things. Can anyone give me some pointers here?

Thanks.

Chris

[Deirdre]

Did you draw attic wall left to right or right to left? The program creates walls correctly when they are drawn clockwise. It appears that you have interior wall facing outward on the second floor.

Did you intend for the jutted out wall to have that roof angle?

Did you check full gable for the front exterior? Suggest that you remove the check for full gable box.

Did you make both ends of the upper story full gable walls?

[csebasti]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I drew both of the attic walls in a clockwise direction. The top one was left to right, the bottom was right to left. If I zoom in close and look at the walls, they are all facing the right direction.

I assume you are talking about the roof angle on the flat portion. Yes, that was intended. The previous owners built that addition on the house and put a flat roof on it. I'm working on putting a gable roof on it, but probably a different pitch. That's a problem for another time.

I've tried doing this with an even more simplified floor plan as well, just a pure rectangle without the bump outs. I still get the same result. The funny thing is that I have actually gotten it to work, but then I make some other changes and can never get it back. Now I can't even get it to work with the super simple floor plan.

Yep, both ends are gable walls. On both floors. I'm still not entirely sure if I need it on the lower floor, but I did it.

I keep getting the error that says "Cannot lower this knee wall. Amount by which roof planes must be adjusted is sufficient to completely eliminate the upper one." And to make mattes worse, I deleted the whole plan, and tried to start over. I drew one exterior wall, with nothing else on the plan, and got that same error message again. Strange...

Chris

[daydreamer]

Hi Chris,
Welcome to the forum.
For the 1-1/2 story follow the instruction in this link: http://www.homedesignersoftware.com/...?faqNumber=358

For future visits to this forum it will be very helpful to all of us if you would enter the Name of your BH&G product and the Version in your Signature. It is especially important now that the new version 8 products have been released. To enter the information in your signature, click on Quick Links near the top of the page by Log Out. In the drop-down box click Edit Signature. Enter your information and click Save Signature.

[csebasti]

Rick,

Thanks for the info. I followed that example, and that works fine, but I have a couple problems with that.

1. This does not include the two knee walls that I have in my house, like in my pictures above. I can add them in, but I still end up with the extra height on the outside walls. I suppose I could lower that to 1 inch, instead of the 24 inches used in the example.

2. More importantly, doing it this way means I can never rebuild the roof again. That is going to be a problem. I am trying to draw up the house as it currently is. Then make the changes that I am thinking of doing. The problem is that I'm trying different things out. One is a dormer upstairs to gain enough room to turn a 1/2 bath into a full bath. The other is putting a peaked roof in place of the flat roof on the back. But I don't know exactly how I want them yet (size of dormer, gable or shed on the dormer, pitch of roof on back addition, etc.) I'm going to need to rebuild the roof as I go through this process.

3. There is an option to assign a wall as a knee wall, so why is it that I can't make it work? It did once, now it won't any more. What's even more frustrating is that it always works on one wall, but not the other now. And sometimes it switches which one works and doesn't work...

So, thanks for the info, and I can make that work, but I'd really like to know if anyone can help me make it work in a way that I'll still be able to rebuild the roof.

[daydreamer]

Hi Chris,
You can also try this. I don't know if Suite has the capability or not.
Build a full sized 2nd story, then double-click on the Roof Tool toolbutton on the toolbar. In the Build Roof dialog box select Ignore Top (2nd) Floor. Place dormers where you want them. You can add walls, but make them "knee walls".