Dimensioning Door Openings

Does anyone have a good and proven way to dimension door openings in floor plans? I’ve tried drawing a line (or intersecting lines) in the rough opening and attempted to dimension to the midpoint of that line (or intersection of lines) but I only get the actual size and not the scaled dimension.

I suppose I could just dimension the rough opening of all doors and windows. But I’ve found that that clutters up the drawing quite a bit. Any input would be awesome.

It may be a good idea to have a threshold line as part of your 2D symbol, that way you can snap to the middle of the door. As to the problem with the dimension, make sure you use the same method / layers / settings you did when dimensioning the walls.

I set out to actual door edges as attached. You could put a centre line through the opening and measure to that.

Good option. However it would mean that threshold line would show up in the drawing. But defiantly a good option. Thank you.

Nice drawing, can I ask, do you use a plugin to generate walls and doors or is this drawn manually? I have tried a lot of plugins but they don,t clean up the wall intersections.

No plugs in. My work flow is to draw in 2D in SketchUp, send to Layout, set to vector, set scale (1:50 here), explode, ungroup (several times usually). After that I can set line weights and style, add text and dimensions and add colour fill, furniture etc. It was a bit tedious to start with but I can now do it very quickly. Obviously if things change I have to go back to SU and start over, but then I’ll just cut the affected area out of the new Layout and paste it into the formatted one. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me as a sole trader on residential work.

thats interesting but not sure why would you use sketchup if your not working in 3D? I use skalp to control line weights and add fills. It all updates when changed but becomes more difficult when drawings doors and windows. it may takes a bit longer to model but then you have all your elevations and sections generated in LO very quickly.

SU with Layout makes for an easy to learn 2D system - I’ve come from 40 years of hand drafting but failing eyesight finally forced me to make the jump to full cad. Over the years I’ve tried lots of programs but none came easily to me, but Layout in particular works for me, especially as I have some experience in dtp as well. I do use SU for 3D building modelling and do pull 2D elevations off it, but I have yet to move to a full 3D model. It’s something for the future as I get more proficient.

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