Get Your Rooms On

I keep track of the rooms in the project regularly. They provide valuable information that contributes to the various room data schedules used for the project. Often, things like areas determine how we are going with budget & the client's brief, and so it is important they are correct. 

As the design evolves over time, sometimes we see these rooms can break, be doubled up or deleted. Keeping track of these changes in Revit is relatively straight forward if you turn on a few subcategories in the visibility graphics. They are often overlooked as they are never on by default. 

If you go to the visibility graphics, turn on subcategories 'Interior Fill' & 'Reference'. 

Now you will see the lines & colour display of the room extents. It also clearly highlights where rooms are missing & where spaces may be overlapping or double up of rooms being placed (indicated as darker shade of blue). 

I leave these subcategories on all the time in my working views and it helps a lot with quality control of the model data.  

We can also set-up a room schedules to identify suspect rooms. In the example below, we can see 3 things going on that need our attention. Room 2.16 is now redundant and may need to be deleted. Therefore room 2.17 should be renumbered. We can also see room 2.17 is 'Not Enclosed' meaning its boundary walls need our attention. 

We can see that room 2.09 has been created, but has not yet been placed within the project. This may have happened because a room list was created by the model manager prior to the rooms being placed by the team. More often though, this is the result of a room being placed and then subsequently deleted during redesign, but was never reassigned to a space.

Finally, its important to remember, that you cannot delete a room from the model floor plans. Rooms can only be deleted from the project via schedules. Revit reminds us of this when we delete rooms from the plans via a pop-up warning...

To delete a room from the project, simply select the room in the schedule and from the ribbon, click Delete.