Doors, windows & openings
Place and edit doors, windows and plain wall openings, every style, default size, hinge and swing option, and how openings cut the wall.
Doors, windows and plain openings are placed on walls. Doors and windows cut a clean opening in the wall and draw a procedural symbol inside it; a plain opening leaves just the gap. Multiple openings can share a wall without any special handling.
Placing a door or window
In the Door, Window or Opening tool, a wall-snapped marker previews where the opening will land (during the placing touch on iOS, on hover on Mac). It greys out over open space, openings only ever drop on a wall - tapping clear of any wall shows a brief reminder instead. With alignment snap on, a tap near the middle of a wall locks to its exact midpoint (a midpoint marker appears on the preview), and an active number snap rounds the offset along the wall, so the marker shows precisely where the opening will commit.
Tap a wall to place a default opening, centred on the tap and clamped to fit (with a ~1 cm jamb at each end). It’s auto-selected: on iPad and Mac its edit sheet opens straight away, while on iPhone a compact action palette appears (delete and properties buttons) and you can drag the opening along its wall immediately - the properties button opens the full edit sheet.
| Opening | Default width | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Door | 0.9 m | Inserts into the room that owns the wall |
| Window | 1.2 m | Defaults to the fixed style, 0.9 m sill, 1.2 m height |
| Opening | 0.9 m | A plain gap, 2.1 m tall by default |
Tapping near an existing opening selects it instead of placing a new one.
Nothing stops two openings overlapping on the same stretch of wall (say, the same door captured by two scans), or one being widened past its wall’s end - rather than blocking the edit, the Drawing health check flags duplicate and oversized openings and offers a one-tap fix. See Drawing health.
Door styles
The door symbol is chosen from a style carousel:
| Style | Symbol |
|---|---|
| Single swing | One leaf from the hinge to the open tip, with a quarter-arc swing. |
| Double swing | Two half-width leaves hinged at opposite ends, meeting in the middle, each with its own arc. |
| Sliding | A panel offset to the open side, a dashed track along the wall, and a direction tick. |
| A short dashed hint showing the wall cavity the leaf slides into. |
Door behaviour options (in the edit sheet):
- Width, slider; moves both ends symmetrically around the centre.
- Height and Height from floor, the clear height and threshold level. They don’t change the plan symbol (the plan is a horizontal cut) but feed elevations, the 3D engine and the paintable-area take-off.
- Hinge side, Left or Right (which end the leaf hinges on).
- Opens, Inward or Outward (which side of the wall it swings to).
- Drawn open, toggle. When off, swing-type doors draw closed (leaf along the wall, no arc). Sliding and pocket styles ignore it.
Window styles
| Style | Interior |
|---|---|
| Fixed | A single glass plane along the centre. |
| Casement | Glass plane plus a V indicator (side-hinged). |
| Sash | Two offset lines splitting the frame into upper and lower sashes. |
| Awning | Glass plane plus two diagonals (top-hinged). |
| Sliding | Two offset half-sashes with a centre direction arrow. |
The same frame-and-glazing symbol prints in your plans: when you export a PDF (or PNG/JPEG), each window draws as its real frame, glass plane and jamb ticks - a casement reads as a casement, a sash as a sash - not as a plain line across the gap.
Window options:
- Width, slider; symmetric around the centre.
- Height and Height from floor, the glazed height and sill level - for elevations, the 3D engine and take-offs, like doors.
- Thickness, the frame depth, default 80 mm, independent of the wall. A wall thicker than the frame leaves a visible reveal; a frame deeper than the wall protrudes inward like a bay.
Plain openings
The Opening tool places the third kind of opening: a doorless, glassless gap - an archway or pass-through between rooms. It breaks the wall cleanly and marks the gap with a faint dashed threshold line and short end ticks, so it reads as deliberate rather than as a hole.
An opening has no style carousel and no swing options; its edit sheet has just Width (0.2–6 m), Height and Height from floor, and Remove. It slides along its wall and anchors exactly like a door or window. Engines that care about sightlines treat it as open space - WiFi signal and CCTV views pass through it.
Moving an opening along its wall
Drag a selected door, window or opening to slide it along its parent wall. It keeps its width, stays clamped inside the corners, and shows a red measuring tape to the nearest corner with a live distance readout, so you can position it to an exact offset. The slide honours the same assists as placement - alignment snap locks to the wall’s midpoint, and a number snap rounds the slide distance.
When the wall changes
Openings are anchored to their wall’s ends, not stretched with it. Reshape a wall - set its length or angle, drag a corner - and each door, window and opening keeps its exact distance from the end that moved least, at its full width. So lengthening or shortening a wall never shifts the openings on it, and moving the whole wall carries them rigidly. An opening pushed past a shortened wall’s end slides back inside at full width, only shrinking if the wall itself becomes shorter than the opening.
Removing an opening
Use the Remove button in the edit sheet (all devices) or the Delete key (with a keyboard) - both ask for a quick confirmation first. The wall heals the gap automatically, and the removal is a single undo step.
Heights and sills don’t change the 2-D symbol - plan view is a horizontal cut - but they carry through to elevations, the 3D engine and area calculations.