Date: January to April 2024
Although my personal style, such as it is, has little of what might be called refinement ("uncouth" was the alternative put forward by my freshman dorm roommate), my project work is freighted with the stuff. And working with the draftsman on the first concept was just a little too painful. For example, need to move and resize the skylight? That's an hour of back and forth. And refinements were needed. I took the plans shown in my last post to the Truss Guy at Appalachian Truss. Its a cool rural production facility nestled up a hollow off the Toe River in Yancy County, He went over the plans and did some preliminary truss designs. He assured me that 2' high first floor trusses could span the space with no supports - a clear span garage would be so great! - so poof the support poles in the initial plans are gone. And he pointed out that structurally the stairwell in my plans was problematic for the second floor trusses. Here is the plan:
To orient my discussion, and almost corresponding to reality, I'll use "north" to refer to the upwards direction in the drawing and the other compass directions accordingly.
To be reasonably sized and provide a clear-span shop space the trusses need to run the short way - from south to north. But the stairwell cuts across that run for half the floor. Besides needing a beefy structure to support that end of the floor, the link between the east-west exterior walls is broken; that will impact the roof truss design which needs to make up for the weakness below. Truss Guy suggested running the stairs the north-south way so they would be parallel to the trusses which makes a lot of sense. However the stairs are entering a garret, and at the top landing you need to have head room, but the roof angle is coming down as you go south, which constrains how far south the top of the stairs can be. Meanwhile height of the 2nd floor dictates how far the stairs have to climb, and code dictates minimums for step and tread size. All of which means that a straight stairwell will not fit north-south, even if you have steps start right at the lower doorway. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to play around with the options in some design software?
To my great fortune I brought back a case of Covid 19 from the Blacksburg holiday celebrations. Charla was understandably reluctant to repeat her miserable Covid experience so I self isolated in my corner of the house until I got a clean test. Which was almost 4 weeks of isolation. I took on the task of finding and learning how to use a building design tool. And of course I'm too cheap to pay for those packages used by engineers and architects - I assure you they are not priced for the home user. However I found an open source package called FreeCAD which has a "Bill of Materials" building design module and a bunch of YouTube training videos showing how easy it was to throw together a framing plan for a garden shed and so on. Those demos were like the pot sweeteners on sports gambling sites: payoff just good enough to get me entering a portion of my plans into the app before the sunk cost fallacy kept me there!
The really good thing about FreeCAD is that it is a 3-D modeling tool. Many of the applications in use for building plans are simply fancy drawing tools that have separate data for each diagram created. For example the Workshop diagram shown above would be a cohesive unit. So to change the location of a door, you'd do it on this diagram, but that would have no effect on the elevation diagram showing the outside - it would still have the door in its original location. So you have to be very careful to propagate every change you make to all the impacted diagrams. In contrast, a 3-D modeling tool has an object representing the door and when you move it, the relationship with the wall object is updated and propagated to all renderings (e.g. generated diagrams).
By the end of my confinement I had moved the needle ahead from the initial drawings, including using a bend in the stairway to resolve the conflict just detailed. This view is called a "section" (as in cross-section) looking from above at a certain height above the floor (that is why the staircase just terminates half way up). Unfortunately it doesn't edit out the irrelevant items such as the root cellar roofs on the north side which will be underground.
You can see above that I've added model data for my various woodworking tools (i.e. band-saw, joiner and planer from the bottom-most up), and done a possible arrangement of them which would allow long boards to be run though without hitting other machines. Inspired by a shop design I saw on YouTube 10 years ago, I added the couple half doors in line with the tools to allow 16' or even 20' stock to be passed through the machines (i.e. to process a 20' board requires double that clear run - one side for feed and the other for excretion). And hey, why not lay out the sub-floor to stagger joints, which can be checked with the truss layout under it.
One of the areas that didn't get enough thought when we built our house was exactly how the backfill was going to work, so I put that data in too.
I was pretty much going hog-wild with the modeling, e.g. how to fit 3 grandchildren into that garret room.
However I don't think the unpaid developers who built the FreeCAD tool had "hog-wild" in their requirement specs, because working on it started to get slower and sllooowwwweeeerrrrrr. Then the tool would start to crash. Clearly my model was far larger with many more relations to maintain than anything they tested with. FreeCAD has an auto-backup mechanism but it was like the good old days back in the late 80's on the floppy-drive PC where one made darn sure to save one's work often and save backups too. Even those preventative measures made work mighty slow as a Save action would take from 2 to 3 minutes.
All that said, moving my work onto my best computer helped a lot (although it could still peg all eight CPUs while loading and crashing). The tool also includes a TechDraw module that generates diagrams from the model data so it was possible to generate semi-professional looking paper copy.
Second Pass Drawings
