Designer House Plan Lessons Learned At The Granite Knee: Part 2

1. Do it right the first time. Designer house plans that are quickly roughed up for preliminary viewing are house drawings susceptible to retaining errors throughout a designer house plan set’s development or to demanding, exhausting corrections on top of corrections later in the project. There’ll be changes enough in any designer house plan project without you fouling your own nest with speed errors early-on. Remember that everyone else is depending on you to get it right on those plan sheets. Inherent errors – including those built in from the get-go to get it to be left for later – degrade respect for and confidence in the design and the designer. Doing it right beats making it right. Every time.
2. Write it on the sheet. We’ve done it both ways with notes – attached them on separate pages of a desinger house plan set and written them right on the house drawing sheet. For sure, the attachments can get ignored, misplaced, removed, and otherwise quickly forgotten on a job site. Our notes now can generally be found on the house drawing sheets to which they pertain or carefully cross-referenced by notation as, say, to separate detail, section, schedule and the like. Occasionally, a client will insist on texted specifications or use selected chunks of House Design Construction Standards in sit-downs with the general contractor, in order to assure that those pages are the ones that both of them are on.
3. Identify abbreviations with keys and identify symbols with legends on each designer house plan drawing sheet. Almost nothing frosts my pumpkins harder than abbreviations or symbols on a house drawing sheet without any reference to whassup up with them. Often this house designer can figure out their meanings, but that’s after nearly four decades of experience. Sometimes, this house designer can’t. Not a clue. If it’s important enough to individually indicate, it’s important enough to tell the other guys what it means. And just as with notes in general or particular, keys and legends belong on each house drawing sheet that has the symbols. Attaching a dictionary of all your scriptings might not play well or long on most jobsites.
4. Describe important things twice (or more), tied to the house drawing itself. This is a lesson about what subs see – usually the house drawing sheet that relates to their work. This house designer has seen wiring diagrams without rooms or even levels identified, extensive slab-on-grade plumbing without any definite sites for through-conduit, no header or sill levels, no window specification at all, little or no identification of change to a footing level, no framing member spacing specification, etc. If there’s something important on a house drawing sheet – an unusual rebar setup, over-standard joisting below a tiled floor, a pierced wall, 6 gangs in a tight space, trim that’ll have to be ripped to fit, odd-sized or oddly attached doors, branched lighting devices at distance from one another, a lap of exterior clads you want done a certain way, a roofline mighty tight to a window sill, etc. – highlight it on the drawing. Circle it with a text reference. Point it out with a bigger leader. Change the font for related text. Make sure that if a detail or stipulation can show up on more than one house drawing drawing – most can – then show ‘em up on more than one house drawing. Do whatever it takes for the subcontractor after hours and hours on the job and near-to-dinnertime to still recognize what’s going on with the next application of house building materials and methods. It has been our experience that General Contractors will as often as not leave subs to their own ends on busy jobsites; so, that a single designer house plan house drawing sheet may be all there is to direct the real work to be done.
5. Design and draw a full set; the cross-checks rule as among and between house floor plan, elevation drawing, ridge-to-footing section plan, whole-house section plan, electrical plan, foundation plan, roof plan, etc. - all together must makeup one single, coherent, reconcilable designer house plan set. Until all the designer house plan set sheets are done, none is all done. Architecture details and schedules monitor the drawn plans, verify, validate.
6. Don't ever be in a hurry. Yours are the earliest presentations, the discoveries of realties yet to come, the lasting impressions and expectations. Get it done to your satisfaction; first, prove it to yourself that you’ve done right and well.
7. Inquire, test, expect the next appearance, and stay vicarious. When it doesn't work for you, then stop and figure whether it's on you or your work.
8. Dimension pragmatically. Most folks who draw well dimensionally when it comes to foundations and framing, but not when it comes to plumbing and wiring, particularly. Granted, plumbers operate in a scripted world apart and electricians are not far behind. I have indeed seen plumbing plans for slab-on-grade applications where base and other points of reference solely involved wall corners and wall lines on centers where common sense dictated that those walls wouldn’t be in place for days or even weeks to come. Give plumbers triangles within which to gauge sub-slab drain lines; draw those triangles with at least one reference to a footing corner (footings will be formed up on a site before walls) and a foot center or dimensioned distance on a footing orthogonal. Electricians need more help in siting outlets than you might expect or they might think they do. If you don’t identify that door casings are outsized, say, RB-3 or larger, then there are far better than even odds there’ll be a call-back of electrician, wallboard sub, and painter to fix up the mess-up when the trim crew can’t set the door casing legs for encroaching switch boxes. In a roughed room – especially in the increasingly common open-area designs – it’s not all that easy to tell where lighting outlets go in ceilings. Sometimes those by-guess and by-golly outlet sitings can be really tough to fix, most often requiring redoing well into the close-up phase of a project or worse – after the furniture goes in. We draw crossing dimensions or centering lines based on rough framing points right on electrical wiring diagrams (which we never incorporate anymore with floor plans - too cluttered) and leave in the floor plan as grayed lined background to the darker circuits, outlets, devices, and notes. Most responsible interior dimensions run from exterior edge of roughed, exterior wall to exterior edge of roughed, exterior wall, and ALL dimensions interior to those outside marks are on-centers (and let the framers mark their plate lines). Bigger houses need sub-standard scales, commonly 3/16":1', down from 1/4":1'; bigger houses do not need to be plotted on ARCH E 48"x36" because no one these days seems to appreciate the sea of plan set paper from ARCH E plots.

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