Troubleshooting Room Selection Issues

In Chief Architect, room definition is established when a room is completely enclosed by walls, so the most common reason for being unable to select a room is if you have left a gap between walls, such as for an opening or doorway. To be recognized as a room by the Chief Architect software, a room must have an unbroken perimeter, then the floor and ceiling will be generated.

To correct a gap between walls

1. A room in Chief Architect is a totally enclosed area defined by any combination of joined Walls, Railings, Half Walls, or Room Dividers (also known as invisible walls), and all of these tools can all be accessed under the Build menu.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Depending on what you want to achieve, you may want to enclose a space with Walls first, and then use the Doorway  tool to create gaps in the walls.
   
   

To check for No Room Definition walls/railings

1. Open the Wall Specification dialog for every wall around the room that will not select.
   
   
   
2. On the General panel, if any walls have No Room Definition checked, remove the checkmark, then click OK.
   
   
   
   
   Note: If you want to be able to dimension to automatically generated Attic Walls, also uncheck No Locate before clicking OK.
   
   
   
3. If the Room still will not select, continue around the room's entire perimeter until you have verified that all of the walls are not set as No Room Definition.
   
   

If you do not think you have left a gap in between the walls, and you have checked every wall and made sure that they do not have No Room Definition selected, then you may have a bad wall connection. Often if this is the root cause, the entire Exterior Room will highlight, you may have a broken wall icon following your mouse cursor, and you may see orange warning triangles pointing out where the unconnected wall is located, as shown in the image below.

Alternately, you may notice wall connections that look incorrect without the warning triangle, particularly if three or more walls are connected to one another or in a curved wall connection situation.

To fix bad wall connections

1. If you see any warning triangles at the end of the walls, or that simply look incorrect in your 2D floor plan view, zoom in on these, select one of the walls, and use the edit handle to drag the wall back, then reconnect the segment to the other wall. Clicking on the warning triangle will allow you to ignore the unconnected wall so that you don't see these warning triangles or delete the wall.
   
   
   
2. Once all of the wall connections are corrected, you should be able to successfully select the room.
   
   

If you have not left any gaps, visually do not see any incorrect wall connections, and cannot select any rooms at all in your plan, then it is likely that you have locked the Rooms layer in your currently active layer set.

To unlock the Rooms layer

1. Select Tools> Layer Settings> Display Options .
   
   
   
2. Scroll down to the Rooms layer and click in the Lock field to remove the padlock icon from this field.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Repeat this process for any other layer sets in which you have been unable to select rooms, then click OK to apply the changes.