The Building and Plan windows

1Open the Building window

A model built from BrickIT! panels is a laminated box: each wall is its brick skin, cut from 1 mm board, glued on a thicker core cut from 2 mm board. The core holds the wall flat, leaves a reveal round every window for the glazing, and has slots for the floors, which tie the walls together. The Building window draws all of that for you from the panels in your project.

Click 🏠 Building 1 in the toolbar over the preview. 📐 Plan 2, two buttons along, opens the Plan window, covered in section 11.

The window has two halves. Down the left are its settings, from the top: the walls in order round the building, the boards, the floors, then internal walls, rooms and lights, porches, buttresses and the size of your cut sheets. On the right, two tabs: Parts and cut sheets and How to build it. Close it with × at the top right; everything you set is saved with the project.

To follow along, we start with a project holding just two drawn walls of a small two-storey house: a Front, 120 × 72 mm with five windows a floor and a door, and a Right side, 60 × 72 mm.

2The walls, in order round the building

The first list says which panel is which wall. Wall 1 is the front, and the others follow round with the building on your left, each with the corner it makes with the next. When the window first opens it guesses from your panels' names - front, side, right, back, left, party, corner and so on.

If one panel is shorter than the walls round it - a party wall seen only above its neighbour's roof - its row shows an amber note offering to Use it as the top of a … wall: a full-height panel with plain brick below and your piece at the top.

3Boards and floors

Boards. Set them to the board you will cut:

• Skin (brick) - 1 mm MDF or 2 mm MDF, the board your brick panels are cut from.
• Core - the core board's thickness, 2 mm unless you change it. The floors and corner keys are cut from it too.
• Core of - for thick walls, each core made of up to 5 boards glued face to face. The window shows the wall's whole thickness beside it.
• Reveal margin - how far the core stands back round each opening, leaving a ledge for the glazing. GlazeIT!'s windows want 1 mm.
• Slot clearance - a little extra in every slot so the tabs go in without forcing. Raise it if your laser cuts tight.

Floors. From the windows puts a floor a 2 ft 6 in sill below each upper row of windows - here at 30 mm. Choose My own levels to name and place floors yourself, with + add a floor; heights are the tops of the floors, from the foot of the walls. Below them, choose whether to have a Base plate, a Plate under the roof and Corner keys between floors - small triangles that hold each corner square.

4The parts and cut sheets

The Parts and cut sheets tab shows every piece it will cut, with a line above saying what they are: the building's outside size, how thick the walls are, how many cores, plates and keys, and how many sheets they fill.

Each core is the wall less the skin's thickness at each mitred corner, with a hole at every opening (larger than the opening by the reveal margin) and slots for the plates. The plates - the base, each floor and the plate under the roof - have tabs all round and an arrow engraved to the front. Cores are cut seen from inside, so their name and the "sand to" lines for the corner mitres are engraved on the inner face.

Click Save cut sheets (SVG) 1 or DXF 2 to save the parts packed on sheets of your laser's bed, one file a sheet. Set the bed's size under Cut sheets at the bottom of the left-hand column (600 × 400 mm unless you change it). The brick skins are not on these sheets: export them from the main window as usual (chapter 4).

Anything worth knowing appears in an amber notes box over the parts - click it to open it. Crowhurst's, for example, says where windows are too close together for core between their reveals, so they share one hole in the core. Anything that stops the carcass being built (floors too close together, a plate outside the walls, a footprint that does not close) is listed in red instead, and the parts wait until it is fixed.

Further down the tab, when the building has them, come the windows and doors (glazing bars, doors and fanlights from chapter 3, cut from thin card) and the buttresses, each with their own save buttons.

5How to build it

The How to build it tab is the kit's instructions, written for this building: each step has a drawing - the parts for this step in blue, what is already built in grey - and what to do.

Click a step in the list, or use ← Back and Next → under each one. The steps run from checking the parts, laminating each wall and sanding the mitres, through glazing from behind while the walls are flat, to building the floors, lowering each wall onto its tabs and standing it up. Steps for front layers, lights, internal walls, chimney stacks, porches and buttresses appear when the building has them.

Print prints the whole guide; Save as a page saves it as a web page to keep beside the kit. For a longer worked example of this tab and the window as a whole, see the Building Guide.

6Internal walls

Internal walls divide the building into rooms and brace it. Each runs square across from the wall you choose to the one opposite, cut from the core board a piece a storey, with tabs into the floors above and below and into the walls' cores. The top storey's piece stops under the plate under the roof, so the roof can still lift off.

1. Under Internal walls, click + Add an internal wall. A small plan appears, with the wall you are editing in amber.
2. Choose the wall it starts From, and how many mm along it from its left end. We put the house's at 48 mm along the Front, between the second window and the door.
3. Untick a storey to leave it out there.
4. Click + Doorway for an opening, and choose Doorway, Arched doorway or Pointed arch and its storey. It is placed from the end at the wall it starts from: at, wide and high, in mm.
5. Click + Hole for wires for a 3 mm hole near the floor, so the lights' wires can pass (section 8).

The line under each wall's name says where it runs, how long it is and how many pieces it makes. If it cannot be built - a doorway taller than its storey, say - a red line says why, and the rest of the building still stands. An amber line warns when it would stand behind a window, where it would be seen.

T-junctions and arcades

An internal wall can also start from another internal wall listed before it: choose Internal wall: … in its From list, and which face it leaves (one face or other face) to run to the nearest outer wall. Its end tab goes through a slot in the first wall.

Once a wall has arched or pointed openings, Between the arches chooses Square piers or Round piers. Round piers are each wrapped in a strip of thin card bent round into a column, with a half column (a respond) at each end against the wall. The strips go on the windows and doors sheets:

7Chimney stacks through the roof

A stack drawn on a wall's top edge (chapter 1) stands on that wall. A stack that rises through the middle of the roof, over a fireplace in an internal wall, is made here instead.

1. Open the internal wall and tick A chimney stack over it, through the roof.
2. Set where it is at along the wall, how wide (along the wall) and deep (across it), and how far it stands above the roof - 14 mm unless you change it. New stacks are 3 ft by 2 ft 3 in, at the middle of the wall.
3. Choose its oversailing courses (None, Two courses, Three courses), up to four pots, their style (Plain, Crown top, Louvred cowl, Tall (Victorian)) and colour.
4. Click Make its brick panels 1.

BrickIT! works the stack's height out from the roof, in whole courses, and tells you how tall it is. Its four faces are added to your panel list as real brick panels - front, right, back and left - to export and cut like any wall, and the note then says so. If you change the stack's size later, the note turns amber again and offers Make its brick panels again. The stack's core - two pieces that slot together into a cross, standing in a plus-shaped slot in the plate under the roof - goes on the carcass sheets; its courses and pots go on the roof's sheets, and the roof is cut round it with the flashing engraved. The guide gets a Build the chimney stacks step:

8Rooms and lights

Once a building has internal walls, Rooms and lights lists the rooms they make on each storey, numbered, with a plan. Pick a storey with its button over the plan.

• Give a room a name if you like, and choose its light: No light, 3 mm LED, 5 mm LED or LED strip.
• Choose its colour - Warm white, Cool white, Gaslight or Oil lamp. The colour is for the 3D window: with Windows lit ticked there, each lit room's windows glow in it.
• Under Wires go down at, choose the outside corner where a hole through every floor - the riser - takes the wires down to the base.

Each light goes in the floor over its room: a hole for an LED, a slot for a strip. Its wires run over that floor to the riser, passing an internal wall through a hole for wires or under a doorway. If a light cannot be wired or has no room, a red or amber line under the list says so. The guide gets a Fit the lights step, done before the floors are stacked.

9Buttresses

Churches, chapels and old warehouses lean on buttresses. Under Buttresses, click + Along a wall for one against a wall's face, or + At every corner for a diagonal (angle) buttress at each outside corner.

Each has a little side view beside its name. Choose where it stands - Along W… a wall, then how many mm along it from its left end to its middle, or Diagonally at the … corner - and how wide, how far out and how tall it is, in 1, 2 or 3 stages, each standing out less than the one below with a sloping weathering on top.

A buttress is built up from its side view: two sides from the skin board, with courses engraved, and layers of the core board between them, faced with its fronts and weatherings. A diagonal one's layers are cut to fit round the corner. Its parts come on sheets of their own, one set for each board, with Save buttress sheets (SVG) and DXF:

The guide's Add the buttresses step comes last: glue each one up, then onto its wall once the walls are built.

10Porches

A porch is a small lower building against one of the walls. Draw its front and two sides as panels first - the front gabled, usually, the sides the same length - then, under Porches, click + Add a porch.

1. Choose the wall it stands Against, and how many mm along it from its left end its middle is.
2. Choose its Front, Left side and Right side from your panels. The building's own walls are not offered.
3. Choose Its roof: Gabled, its ridge back to the wall, at a roof pitch you give unless its front is gabled (a gabled front sets its own), or Lean-to, sloping down from the wall - the front is the low eaves, and each side panel needs a sloping top, high at the wall.

A line under it gives the porch's size. Its cores go on the carcass sheets, the guide gets a Build the porch step, and its roof is made with the building's roof in the 3D window (chapter 6).

11The Plan window

The Building window starts from walls you have drawn. The 📐 Plan window works the other way round: draw the building's footprint, and each wall becomes a panel. The building stands up in 3D beside the plan as you work, its walls labelled.

Start from a rectangle or an L

Click Rectangle for a 160 × 70 mm footprint with walls named Front, Right side, Back and Left side, or L-shape for six walls. Each wall has a card on the left: its name (click to change it), its length in mm, the corner it makes, and whether it is a new wall - a panel is made on Apply, plain so far or designed.

Type a new length into a card and the wall's far corner moves along its line (the next wall's corner changes with it, so check the corners after). Or drag a corner on the plan: it lines up with its neighbours as you go (hold Shift to move it freely). Click a wall, its label or its card to select it; the selected card offers Apply and edit this wall, which applies the plan and takes you to that wall's panel. Drag empty space to pan, scroll to zoom, and Fit brings the whole footprint into view.

Draw a footprint

In a new project, the Plan window shows your one panel as a single line, with a red note that the footprint does not close. Drawing a footprint, or choosing Rectangle or L-shape, replaces it.

1. Click Draw walls.
2. Click each corner of the outside face of the walls in turn. Points snap to the grid, and walls to angles in 15° steps, and the length of the wall you are drawing is shown as you go. Backspace undoes a point, Esc cancels, and Shift turns snapping off.
3. Click the first point again to close it.

New walls are as tall as the Eaves height under New walls; below it are the footprint's size and area.

Trace an old plan

1. Click Underlay… and choose a picture of the plan - a scan, a photograph of a drawing, a map.
2. BrickIT! switches to Scale: click one end of a dimension you know (a scale bar is ideal), then the other end.
3. Type how long it is in feet (full size), metres (full size) or mm (model), and click Scale the underlay.
4. Use Move to drag the picture into place if you need to, and the slider beside it to fade it. ✕ removes it.
5. Click Draw walls and click round the outside of the walls on the picture.

When you are happy, click Apply to project. Walls that had panels keep them, resized to the plan; new walls get new plain panels; and the Building window's walls and corners are set to match. The underlay is saved with the project, so it is there next time you open the Plan window.

Where next

• To see the building in 3D, put the roof on and take pictures: 3D, roofs and pictures.
• To cut the brick skins: Cutting it out.
• For a longer walkthrough of a building from two walls to a finished carcass: the Building Guide.