drawing a 'half wall' on one side of a cellar

[TomB]

I'm buying a house and need to draw up an addition for it.  I want to end up with a drawing that I can give to the concrete and excavation guy plus a drawing for the walls and roof builder.  The house begins as a 28' wide 32' deep gable roof, one story with a full basement.  The house is built into a hill such that the back of the house is about a foot above terrain and in the front the cellar is only 3 feet below terrain.  There is a cut in the dirt to the cellar entrance door.
Three questions:
1.   How do I make the front cellar wall 3'6" high concrete with a chamfered front edge (the other cellar walls are 8' high) then top the wall with a 4'6" high framed wall. The front door to the cellar apartment penetrates both the framed and concrete parts of the wall.   The windows in the front wall are only in the framed section.
2.   I think all the concrete cellar walls are 8" poured but the inside seems to be either 1-by glued to the concrete or 1 ½" stud and then a layer of ½" drywall.  The wood framed section of the front cellar wall is set so that the drywall goes floor to ceiling with no ledge.  So how do I define a wall with that many components?
3.   The addition will go in the back and match the floor level of the existing ground floor.  It will be put over a 4' deep crawl space.  How do I show the addition poured wall that is against the existing cellar wall but not so deep that is reaches the existing footing and how do I show the addition of drain tile type pipe buried under the new footer?

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Tom,

It is a little hard to visualise from a description, exactly what you are trying to do but will give some general comments that hopefully will get you going in the right direction.

First, the walls that are part one material and part another are obviously existing walls, so do you even need to show how they are made up as I assume they will stay as they are anyway?  Normally only the addition would need to have that detail.

Two textures on a wall can be shown using the Wainscot on the Wall Properties Trim settings. See this post for more details: http://forums.turbofloorplan.com/index.php/topic,1028.0.html.

If you want to show the upper and lower section with different thicknesses, then you will need to create a new Building Location (Settings menu) for the upper half of the wall. Draw the 8' concrete walls on all sides on the Foundation Location, select the front one and set its height to 3'6". Now on the new Location (eg Front Top Wall) set its Floor Level at -3'6" and the Wall Height to 4'6" and just draw the top part of the wall, choosing a framed wall, on the new Location. That will put a framed wall on top of the Foundation's concrete one.

If I am understanding correctly, the addition is level with the Ground Floor but the walls for it go below that to the bottom of the crawl space. In other works the crawl space is in effect another floor level (hence a new location - maybe called Crawl Space). Its floor level would be set at -4' and wall height 4'. Draw the walls on the Crawl Space Location, then the other addition walls on the Ground Floor location.

Generally think in terms of each floor level being a separate location with its Floor Level setting as being its distance from the Terrain (which is zero) to the top surface of the floor and hence the bottom of the wall build on it. Floor levels below ground are a minus figure (eg -8' for Foundation). The upper part of the front basement wall would have a Floor Level at -4'6" and, while there is no floor as such, it is the bottom of the that particular wall.

To get the slope of the Terrain you need to know the angle or the height it drops over a specific distance, sloping down from 1' above zero at the back of the house to 3' below at the front.  You may want to use the Pad tool for the Foundation floor and another for the base of the crawl space, setting the thickness accordingly (minus figures) as this will cut the hole in the Terrain. Shape the Foundation Pad to cut out the path to the foundation door also. On the Pad tool, make sure the setting "Hug Terrain" is not ticked and the pad will sink the Terrain to the depth you set the pad.

OI hope some of that makes sense. Ask again if you cannot follow anything or if I have misunderstood what you are doing.

Allan