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Michael Wilson/4 min read

Adding Rooms to Design Options in Revit: Ensuring Proper Placement and Avoiding Errors

Rooms + Design Options

Rooms must be placed within the correct design option. If a room is placed outside its option's geometry, Revit may report 'Room not enclosed' or assign it to the wrong option. Verify each room's design option setting in properties before finalizing.

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Now, we're going to add back the rooms we removed previously.

Now, we're going to add back the rooms we removed previously. And so, if I were to go to my Architecture tab, and then Room, you can see that we have this drop-down where I can add new rooms. And if you notice, there's no option for the rooms that we previously had, because we're drawing it on Option Set 2. If I were to go back to my main model, you can see the ones that we deleted previously are now back and ready to be used again.

The reason that it is set up that way is to allow us to use the same room types and names within the different options. One thing you may have noticed as well is, because I'm in the main model and not in the individual options, is that when I go to place rooms, it's using the room boundaries from our original design option. But as we change that, you can see it'll stop recognizing those different room spaces.

When we're in only Option 1, or if I were to, say, go back to our primary option, which was our original option, you can see that this is just an entire space that's no longer part of this option. And so, it just depends on which way, and because this is invisible, which way we have it set up. And so, if I were to go back and change my design options to show my Option 1, when I try to place a room, you can see it's only going to recognize these three spaces, but it doesn't.

But when I change it to that main model option, it's going to be back to the way it was, no matter what, because this is set to my primary option, regardless of how I have the view set. So it's one of those things where you have to make sure you've got your view set correctly when placing the room, because if you don't, then you're going to end up stuck with, let's say you were trying to figure out the area of this restroom. Well, if you don't have it set to the proper design option, then what's going to happen is you're not going to get the area that you're looking for or hoping for, and you could end up with a bad takeoff.

And so, what we'll do here is we'll go ahead and use those same room names and numbers, and I'm just going to change it to main model here so I can recall what they were. But it's 209 and 210 for men and women here, and so I want to be able to use these spaces effectively. So I'm going to set this to Option 2, and this is going to be our men's room, which is going to be 209.

And I will get an error saying that we have duplicate values, because those rooms are already part of it, but we're going to go ahead and do it anyway. So I've got my men's room, and then I'm going to go ahead and add a room here for women, and again, you'll see we'll get that same error again. And now we've got our rooms on the second floor for men and women, and we'll go ahead and do the same thing on level one.

So, RM is the keyboard shortcut for Room, and I can go ahead and add this one in and do the same thing where I revise the room numbers, and it looks like it will be 110 and 111, just based on the numbers of these rooms here. We'll go with 110, same thing. We're going to get those errors there, so we'll call this one Men’s, and then 111 jumps to 115 because that will be the next one in sequence without making a duplicate, but we're going to break the rules and use the same number.

And so now we've got our rooms placed for option set two, and we want to make sure we can do the same thing for option set one. So what we'll do is the next video, we're going to go ahead and get all of these views set up so that they can put on a sheet, and that's going to involve some duplicating and some visibility and graphic override settings.