porch floors higher then house

[Curtis Johnson]

Gayle:

I think what Wendy is getting at is that it appears that you haven't, in the minimum, learned many of the basics of using CA, of which setting floor defaults is one of the first things you should learn and do when setting up a project.

From your images, it appears that your porch was actually be built with joists based on your 1st and 2nd images (the floor diaphram looks thicker than 4"). It is not obvious to me exactly what type of walls you used to define your porch initially.

If you want CA to frame the floor for you, then you should probably call the room a deck with a ceiling above (structure tab). Then when you open up the structure tab, you will have a place to define your deck (porch) planking thickness as well as the joist thickness.

For decks, CA's floor structure defaults are 1-1/2" and 7-1/2" for decks. I don't recall why CA uses 7-1/2" vs. 7-1/4" for the joists so if you want 2 x 8's for joists, you'll need to make that change. I don't think you want to use I-Joists in any location exposed to the weather - that is the wrong place to use them.

CA is an extremely powerful program with tons of bells and whistles to learn how to use. You have to exercise some self motivation in learning the very basics of the program if you are going to become a proficient user and it doesn't appear you have made that effort yet. I do commend you for learning how to post images on the forum and that is a very good thing to know how to do when it comes to discussing problems and displaying images of those problems.

Don't feel like you are getting picked on ... someone will always try to help out ... but, you might get a bit of advice from some users that may not necessarily answer your question but in the long haul will help you get better at using the program because a lack of responses to your questions on the forum forces you to do some digging for the answers on your own. There is another CA forum on Yahoo you can participate in if you desire.