Kitchen Design in the Computer Age

Designing or re-designing a kitchen is a big task. We know it is the one area of the home that can give you the most 'bang for your buck' as far as return on investment and effort.  But how do you go about coming up with ideas for your kitchen, much less get a true sense of what it might look like?  Lucky for you, in today's computer driven world, you can fairly quickly get comfortable with various computer aided drafting programs that can help you tremendously.

So let’s get started with looking at how someone might begin a kitchen design using ChiefArchitect. This can save you a lot of time and frustration, especially when working with clients and property owners as we do in our Tucson Corporate Housing business (you can visit us at: http://tucsoncorporatehousing.net)

As I begin here’s a completed view of the floor plan that we’re going to go through and create, our wall elevation and finally a cross section. Let’s open up the program and begin our floor plan.

Chief Architect residential design software includes the major architectural elements for walls, windows, doors, cabinets, electrical, roofs, and framing – everything that you need for residential design. To begin our kitchen I’m going to use an exterior wall tool and I’m going to shape out the rectangular room, just simply by drawing our walls.

You’ll notice when I get to the final wall there I get a visual indicator that it snaps to show me alignment. With our dimension tools we have an automatic exterior dimension that you can place the dimensions with, and when you have these walls you can resize them just by simply clicking on them or you can highlight the dimension and enter in a specific number. In this case I’ll enter 24’ and again if you want to highlight the wall, you can easily move it, resize it. Let’s go ahead and select this dimension and we’ll enter in 32’.

Once we’ve got that setup, if you’re a kitchen and bath designer let’s go ahead and zoom in here. You’ll notice that my dimension is actually going to the outside of this wall, and in Chief Architect our walls are actually composed of different layers. Let’s explore this wall just for a minute.

In this wall type you’ll notice that it actually has six different layers here, sheet rock, siding, the sheathing and when I do a materials list all of these components will show up. Kitchen and bath designers or interior designers typically only want to dimension to the wall surface, so I can set my dimensions up to do that and we also have a specific tool to allow you to do your interior dimensions.

With our interior dimension tool, let’s go ahead and switch my set so it will display in inches, I’ll just drag a dimension through this way and a dimension through this way. Let’s pull those dimensions up and over, if I zoom in here you can see that I’m going to have 276” of wall space where I’m going to go ahead and place my cook hood and range.

With the 3D camera overview tool we can take a top down view look of the design, notice that we already have the materials for the flooring, the baseboard and the wall colors as well as the ceiling height. All of these are defaults that I’ve set up for this template plan. If I double click on the room, you can see that my ceiling height is 109’ and 1/8th. On the diagram on the right hand side of the panel here is information with different layers for the ceiling structure, the floor structure.

With an 8’ ceiling by the time you add those components up, the total dimension is 109’ and 1/8th. If you’re an interior designer you may only care about the finished ceiling height which is 107’ and 5/8th’s. Let’s go ahead and close this and add your windows. Let’s go ahead and rotate around here, while you’re in your 3D view you can use the window tool or the door tool and place your objects in here, and you can easily reposition them, resize them.

If I tile my screen here to look at both views at the same time, you can see exactly where this window is located, if I zoom in and select that window in our 2D view you can see the exact location of it. Just like we moved the walls we can move this window, you can also highlight the dimension and enter in a specific number. I’m going to try 7’ and 3/8ths from the inside of that wall, actually if you look at that it’s actually going to the framing wire. You can set that up to go to the sheet rock if you want for your dimensions.

Once I have that window in location let’s go ahead and go back in to our main 3D view, let’s double click on that window and when you have the window open, this is a generic custom window in Chief Architect. We also include manufacturer windows if you want to use a manufacturer specific window, but with a Chief Architect window you can change the look of the object, in this case I have changed it to a fix window.

Let’s go ahead and change the width to 32” and perhaps 60”, then our floor to top is 100”. Notice I’ve already set my default for the color of the frame and the casing, and on the interior side if you notice the casing tab there are many tabs along the top, I’ve suppressed the interior casing but you’ll find many options that you can create a variety of window styles using the program. With our dimensions set let’s press okay and I may need to go back and reset those dimensions since we made a change to it, let’s go ahead and set that back to 7’ and 3/8th’s.