Changing Wall Types for Exterior and Interior Walls in Revit: A Step-by-Step Guide

I’m going to jump back to Level 1 now. And we’re going to change our wall types to be the actual types we want for our project. So, we’ll have a type for our exterior walls, and then we’ll have a type for our interior walls, and then eventually, when we get to drawing the curtain walls, we’ll have a type for our lobby storefront or curtain walls in that location.

The first one I’m going to do is the exterior wall, and this is where the rubber hits the road here because by changing this type, we could impact our overall dimensions. So, you want to make sure that the exterior face of your wall is out, and we know that because of the toggle. The location line is set to finish face exterior, and that should keep it to where we’re not changing any of the dimensions.

To select all of my exterior walls, we can use our good friend, the Tab key here, and that will allow us to have the option to select all of those exterior walls. If you remember, when we hover and hit TAB, we’re just tapping the Tab key once. I can then left-click to select that chain.

Now, when we change this type, we are going to adjust the width of this wall. And so we’re just going to want to, even though we double-check to make sure our settings are correct, we’re going to want to double-check these overall dimensions again. So, I’m going to change it to ‘Exterior Brick on Metal Stud.’

We want to change it to ‘Exterior Brick on Metal Stud.’ And I repeated that because a lot of people will just pick the first one they see, but these are very different wall types here. We want to make sure we’re on ‘Exterior Brick on Metal Stud.’

And that’ll adjust our exterior wall type. You can see that the thickness was very different. As we go through, you can see that we have a 40-foot dimension and a 100-foot dimension maintained.

Now, we’re going to do the interior walls. Before we do the interior walls, though, what I want to do is double-check the construction of our exterior wall. This is helpful because, by doing that, we can actually take a look and see what makes up that wall.

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Then, we can adjust our interior walls to have a similar type of construction. So, everything can mesh together pretty well. If I select my exterior wall and then go to edit type, we can click edit next to where it says structure.

Then, we can look at what makes up this wall from the exterior side all the way down to the interior. And so, you can see there are many layers that are outside of what they’re calling the core boundary here, which is the structural element of the wall. And then, you have your interior finish.

Here, it’s odd that they picked half-inch drywall because we’re going to use five-eighths for our interior. If we have exterior walls that link in with interior walls, we’re going to want to make sure that those can line up with the finish appropriately if the studs lined up. So, I’m going to change this to five-eighths of an inch so that it’s the same.

It’s only one-eighth of an inch difference, but it’s actually noticeable in the plan if you don’t have it right because of the line weights. So, I’ll hit OK and OK again, and we shouldn’t see any change there.

The next thing we’ll do is address these interior walls.

And so, if I were to go in and select the walls, that would be a long process, right? If we were trying to do it like this, we’re going to be clicking for a long time. We don’t want to do that. Instead, what we’re going to do is use a crossing.

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So, we have two different types of window selections. We have a window itself, and a window is only going to select an object that’s fully encompassed within it, whereas a crossing is just going to grab whatever it touches. We’ll use a crossing from the top left corner, and I want to move myself over so that when I come down with the crossing, I don’t hit this wall here.

I’m moving it over, and you can see here that by doing that, I’ve actually selected grids and walls. And this is where filter really comes into play. If I use the filter option here, I could go through and uncheck the objects I don’t want to select.

So, I’ll hit OK, and then I’m going to go in and change the wall type. We have an interior wall type, and it’s called ‘Interior Four and Seven-Eighths.’

So, it’s a three-and-five-eighths inch stud with five-eighths drywall on each side. That’s a pretty common wall type for this type of building. So, I’ll hit OK, and it’s a pretty minor change.

Not much going on there, but that gets us started. The next video, we’re going to actually modify these two walls here to create an interior alcove and an exterior alcove for our entrance to kind of change it up at the main entrance location.