Window family is just wall opening?

[jessica.146534]

Most of the projects my firm works on are renovations so I need to have existing and new windows. I've had problems with trying to demo the existing and install new windows in the same spot (Revit gives me all sorts of warnings about "instances not cutting anything") and I know this is a common gripe about window families. So in an effort to work around this, I made the actual window family just the wall opening and then made the windows generic model families (see attached file). This way, when I demo the existing window, the opening remains and the wall doesn't self-heal and I don't get any errors/warning when inserting the new window.

Does anyone see any major problems with creating windows this way? I'm only in schematic design right now so I'm trying to find out if I'll have any issues down the road.

[patricks]

If you do window schedules, I don't think your new windows will schedule properly that way. Our firm doesn't do window schedules, we just tag them by type and then show the types in a legend view.

[jessica.146534]

thanks, the schedule is the one thing i can think of that will be tricky but i think i can get around that. if i treat the window (opening) families the same way i would a regular window family, i think i can still assign parameters and characteristics of the window (like size, configuration, material, etc.). i'll post my results when i get to the schedule to let everyone know how it works out!