Dept of Sneaky Tricks

[ebdesign]

Try using a 3/4" "landing" in rooms w/ hardwood & stairs. The stairs "find" the landing & the sections look better.
Whether I use a slab or landing, I have to remember to raise any base moldings, cabinets, furniture, etc 3/4" off floor.
Jim

[dimprov]

Try using a 3/4" "landing" in rooms w/ hardwood & stairs. The stairs "find" the landing & the sections look better.
Whether I use a slab or landing, I have to remember to raise any base moldings, cabinets, furniture, etc 3/4" off floor.
Jim

Jim,

I take it that 3/4" is the thickness of your hardwood finish floor and that you do these landings at both the top and bottom of the stairs so as not to throw off the riser height?

David

[Gene Davis]

Are you suggesting this, Jim, for any stairset either springing from or landing to a floor that is hardwood finished?

Is your "landing" a little thingie, or is it the size of a tread, or is it instead sized to be the entire floor area of the room from which or to which the stairset springs or lands?

I'm just wondering.

For rooms with floor finish of any significant thickness, such as hardwood and tile, I'll raise cab heights accordingly, but I don't understand the need to raise base moldings, unless of course I am using a textured slab in the room to emulate the floor finish, instead of just a 2D texture job.

[WendyWelton]

Yes David, I'm including adjustments for Chief Quirks. Chief's "floor" is really the subfloor, so if you're really really really tight on the stairs, you need to account for that. Ditto with the ceilings. Actually, I think we have ceiling thickness now. I should know this! But, I'm tired.

[Allen42acj]

I tested this out before.
Because of the floor thickness issue, the headroom is lost at the bottom of the stairs.

The bottom of the stringer(1st step) will in real life be 3/4" +/_ higher.
The top step will be that much lower in real life.

If left as it is in Chief, the place that will give you a false measurement is at the bottom of the stairs.

[dimprov]

Allen,
Can you give a simple example? I'm not quite tracking what you mean.

David

[ebdesign]

I use the landing for the entire room; wherever there's hdwd (or tile) & stairs, I use a landing. In other rooms, I just use a slab. It's pretty easy to generate a room polyline & make it a landing or slab.
You have to raise the base molding off the floor (actually the sub floor) in the room spec dbx or 3/4" of the base will be "buried".
I don't do this for every job, but if you need this level of detail & accuracy to calculate headroom, etc, it works well.
Jim

[Allen42acj]

Hi Dave
Here is a very quick plan of it.
It can drive yo nuts thinking about figuring this out to get it right.
Better to just leave extra headroom..

[Gene Davis]

Too bad we cannot do a LOCK on stairs and THEN raise the whole stairset up. Then DOUBLE-LOCK the thing.

Of course, this would only be done when floor finish thicknesses are equal at the SPRING FROM and LAND TO points.

Maybe in version-NEXT we will have, in the dialog boxes, a place to insert FFT in at the SPRING FROM and LAND TO points, then Chief can do its thing and build the model accordingly. Seems kind of simple to me.

[lbuttery]

Gene:

what we really need is to have floor and ceiling and roof layers just like we already have for walls.

CA should review how "assemblies" are created for the estimating and material list software and National Craftsman etc and allow us to create models that match these standard "assemblies"

this would be a vast improvement to the material lists chief creates also and allow for a tie-in with Nationals Craftsman databases etc.

RSMeans would be another choice, maybe both ???

Lew

[dimprov]

Thanks, Allen. I see what you mean now. It perfectly illustrates what happens because the Chief model ignores a simple physical reality: namely, floors have thickness, and so do ceilings.

The workaround that I used in the example you present was to set the tread depth to zero. Then I added polyline solids with the same depth as the finish floor (i.e. 3/4" in your example) on each tread and also on the next floor above. If you do that, then the riser height math computes correctly, and you sidestep the problem that your example illustrates. Does this count as a sneaky trick? However, it only works if the finish floor thicknesses on each floor is the same, and the tread depth is the same too. If they're different, then it requires more drastic measures to force the staircase into the required shape.

It also illustrates why I gravitated to the same interpretation of floor height as Wendy. The sneaky trick I propose here doesn't work with the other interpretation, namely that "floor height" really means "height of the top of the finish floor."

Excellent example, Allen. It illustrates a multitude of intrinsic problems in the way Chief models a house. Until Chief has the notion of floor thickness written into its datastructure, the only way the stair tool can be patched is in a DBX where it asks you to tell it what the finish floor thickness is at both the top and bottom of the stairs and then it adjusts accordingly. It would be just an ugly kludge though versus cleaning up the assumptions and nomenclature and doing the job properly.

David
X2
Vista 64

[Allen42acj]

You're welcome David
And thank you..
For now it just matters how much time and detail you want to put into it..

For now, I think just being aware of it and leaving extra room is the easies/fastest way.

Maybe X3 will be out and Wendy will start a new (sneaky tricks X3) thread before she gets upset that we're going off topic..

[dimprov]

Too bad we cannot do a LOCK on stairs and THEN raise the whole stairset up. Then DOUBLE-LOCK the thing.

During one of my more desperate moments I thought about converting a staircase into a symbol to accomplish what it is that you are proposing. Does that qualify as a sneaky trick? I stopped short of doing it, but it seems like it would be the master key to forcing staircases into whatever shape you want and then placing them into your model in a way that keeps them from unraveling into something you don't want. The only downside I can see is that your material list will be wrong and would require manual amendment to get it right again. Also, if you change floor heights, the stairs won't auto-adjust accordingly, and so you would then need to make a new symbol. However, at least for me the material list is...well, let's just say that it's a tradeoff I would happily make if it buys me total control over stair behavior. In a nutshell: brain dead stairs are better than retarded stairs that resist doing what's needed.

David
X2
Vista-64

[WendyWelton]

I use the landing for the entire room; wherever there's hdwd (or tile) & stairs, I use a landing. In other rooms, I just use a slab. It's pretty easy to generate a room polyline & make it a landing or slab.
You have to raise the base molding off the floor (actually the sub floor) in the room spec dbx or 3/4" of the base will be "buried".
I don't do this for every job, but if you need this level of detail & accuracy to calculate headroom, etc, it works well.
Jim

So Jim - when you have 3/4" of hardwood floor, are you puttng a "landing" at the bottom that's at + 3/4"? Now that's sneaky, in a good way!

[WendyWelton]

During one of my more desperate moments I thought about converting a staircase into a symbol to accomplish what it is that you are proposing. Does that qualify as a sneaky trick? I stopped short of doing it, but it seems like it would be the master key to forcing staircases into whatever shape you want and then placing them into your model in a way that keeps them from unraveling into something you don't want. The only downside I can see is that your material list will be wrong and would require manual amendment to get it right again. Also, if you change floor heights, the stairs won't auto-adjust accordingly, and so you would then need to make a new symbol. However, at least for me the material list is...well, let's just say that it's a tradeoff I would happily make if it buys me total control over stair behavior. In a nutshell: brain dead stairs are better than retarded stairs that resist doing what's needed.

David
X2
Vista-64

Very sneaky - yes. You could leave the Chief Stair in the model, just turn that layer off in sections.