Finally, A Reviting Opportunity (In Revit)
Well, it’s finally happened. The man I usually draw houses for—you know, glorious 2D Autocad and nothing more—has let me loose on a Revit project. A simple one, I thought. A rectangular box of a house, plonked onto a reasonably spacious section already occupied by a similar-looking structure.
The issue? That existing house was too small. The plan: redraw a new, slightly larger house on the same site. So far, so good.
Then I discovered something: the foundations were wooden piles, not concrete. That’s when things started getting... interesting.
"Wait, It’s on Piles?"
In other words, the floor structure was timber, not a concrete slab. We’d need little piles going down into the ground to hold up posts. And here’s the catch—I’d never done that in Revit before.
My first thought: “Okay, posts are columns, right?” I went ahead and modelled them as such. In hindsight, maybe generic models would’ve been a smarter call. I searched for foundation pads but couldn’t find anything truly suitable. I didn’t have time to watch 10,000 YouTube videos either, so I created my own generic model—basically, a block of butter with a hole in the top.
I made two types: one 300mm deep, another 900mm. Posts would sit inside them—some 800mm deep—leaving a nice 100mm concrete base. This approach, though seemingly clever at the time, would come back to bite me later. Big time.
Bearers, Joists, and Trouble Brewing
Next issue: how do I create bearers and joists underneath the house? Do I just slap in 140x45 joists at 450 centres and call it a day?
Well, I remembered an earlier project for a particularly demanding client. He had a homes-for-sale company and wanted a standard drawing template. For that job, we used bearers made from two 190x45s nailed together (so, 190 deep by 90 wide), sitting on 125mm square pile foundations, each going down to a concrete pad. Joists were also 190x45 at 450 centres.
Next challenge: how many piles do we need, and where should they go? That meant diving into NZS 3604 for some guidance.
The Shape Shifts...
The building size allowed for a neat layout of posts at 1880mm in one direction and 2017mm in the other. All worked well—until I realised the house wasn’t a perfect rectangle.
They wanted a little deck cut out of part of it. Now we had an L-shaped house. No worries, I thought. I’ll just run the joists straight out from the main structure. But then it hit me—decks need H3.2 timber, not the H3.1 you use under floors. So, those joists had to be different.
This meant building a separate support system for the deck. I ended up placing a row of columns along the deck line, with blocks on the back of the piles to support the house itself. Probably not best practice, so I slapped a “TBC” (to be confirmed) label on the drawings.
Just Move It, He Says...
The house was nicely positioned on the site. I sent it off. Then I got the call.
“Client wants it moved. Just a little—about 1000mm.”
Right. Into site view I go. I turned on all objects using the little lightbulb button, selected everything, and shifted the house over. Easy.
Except... my piles drawing was suddenly out of sync. Some piles had moved; others hadn’t. Turns out, there were constraints going on behind the scenes. And remember how I’d given the joists, bearers, and piles all separate levels? They were now stacked like lasagna, overlapping in views, all at 1:50 scale, completely covering each other.
In plan view, it was okay—you could tweak the view range. But still, it was chaos.
Height in Relation to Boundary (The Joy…)
Back it went to the man. Then he asked, “Have you considered Height in Relation to Boundary (HIRB)?”
Nope.
For a simple rectangle house parallel to one boundary, that meant slicing sections on either side—from the uphill to the downhill side. I’d draw a reference plane through the right-hand side, then use that to establish the HIRB plane: up 2.5m, then back at a 45° angle. If anything crossed it, it failed. Simple as that.
What I don’t understand is why some architects draw multiple HIRB profiles on the same boundary. Unless the roofline is seriously jagged, one profile should be enough.
And Then There Were Two...
Then came the curveball: “We might put two of these houses on the site.”
Great.
I copied the house, but all its levels came with it. So, I created a new level just for the second house and called it "Level 7." It worked—sort of.
Every time I moved the second house, something got left behind. Maybe I didn’t select everything. Maybe it was because I was in hidden line mode instead of wireframe. Either way—trap for young players.
Surprise Retaining Walls
Then came news of a retaining wall—one that didn’t show on the GIS map I downloaded for the concept plan. So I had to rework the site topography in Revit to match photos and field notes. A pain, but doable.
And that brings me to a key realisation…
My Methodology Might Be Broken
Maybe I should’ve drawn the house as a separate project entirely. That way, if someone wants the same house mirrored or on another site, you just link it into the new project. The catch? Revit places the house at (0,0), so if your site sits at, say, 30m elevation, your house is buried underground. You have to go digging through the site view, find it, and move it up.
And of course, the level markers on the house will still say "0." You can’t easily turn that off either. It breaks the beauty of Revit, where everything is connected—move one thing and everything else updates. But maybe that’s the price of flexibility?
Printing Woes and the Great Level Jungle
Eventually, someone will ask to print everything. “What are you printing? Which views? Which sheets?” And now you’re dealing with multiple units, each with different levels, and all kinds of overlapping nonsense. Try making elevations without level marks from other units crashing the party—impossible without endless tweaking and hiding.
Honestly, it’s a mess.
Maybe there is a better way. Maybe there’s a future YouTube tutorial that solves it all. But for now, that’s where I’m at.
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