Roof/Wall Height

[JoAnn]

I attempted to replicate your house using your pictures, but of course the measurements are not exact.
I followed the instructions I gave for the room over the garage, and this is how it turned out.
I used only the basic building tools, that I believe your software version also has.

I also added the interior knee walls.

Keep trying until you get it.

[JoyA]

I attempted to replicate your house using your pictures, but of course the measurements are not exact.
I followed the instructions I gave for the room over the garage, and this is how it turned out.
I used only the basic building tools, that I believe your software version also has.

I also added the interior knee walls.

Keep trying until you get it.

Well thank you. That's beautiful. Better in one day than I have achieved in a year of working on this plan. I'm apparently looking in the wrong forum for help. Thanks everyone anyway. I'll go look for a "Home Designer for Dummies" site.

[JoAnn]

Open a new practice plan to play with. Just 4 walls. Add a 2nd floor. Open up the 2nd floor room dbx and lower the 'finished ceiling height' to 0". Rebuild the roof and take a 3d look. Draw the knee walls. Open up their wall boxes, and designate them as 'kneewalls'. NOW uncheck 'auto build roof'. Highlight the room again, and in the room structure dbx tab, raise the 'finished ceiling height' to 10'6". Take a 3d look at the exterior and use the full camera to view the interior. Can you see how this changed things?

Both of these help files in in the help database might help:

http://www.homedesignersoftware.com/...icle/KB-00904/

http://www.homedesignersoftware.com/...icle/KB-00358/

[JoyA]

This is why I felt like I was in the wrong forum: I really did not understand knee walls and the Help Index was not helping me understand. However, my husband does know these things (I should have asked him first). So now I understand knee walls. We also discovered that the garage was 4 feet shorter than it actually is (my bad, I was too lazy to measure it), but I knew the upstairs room dimensions were right, well once it was shifted over 4 feet, that made it possible to have the knee wall in the right place upstairs. So now I think I have adjusted all the walls, but I get these errors for all the walls I have specified as knee walls when I try to build the roof:



I will try again what you suggested if I can get past these errors.

[JoAnn]

Now I'm confused. You seem to have changed a lot of your dimensions.
It also appears that you have removed the exterior walls at the top left corner, and these are needed for the bottom of the roof to rest upon.
Knee walls are meant to be interior walls. Fix that and the error messages will probably go away.
Google 'knee wall' and look at all the images shown to get a better idea of what they are.

Also, a section of your front porch (in the real house pic) shows that it does not have a roof over it (the door area on the side wall of the garage). You should partition it with an invisible railing, so that you can select that area of the deck and specify 'no roof over this room'. That section of porch roof might interfere with the roof that you are trying to fix.