Custom House Plan Details - Extensive, Unique Checklist

INTRODUCTION

• This house designer gets all choky when he’s shown other guys’ custom house plan details.
  • There are the usual suspects
    • interior elevations of bathrooms and other complex spaces
    • rough drawings of house door profiles in elevations, etc.
  • There are on occasion the usual pretenders – not details at all, but entire-element drawings or something else entirely - notices, boilerplate
    • whole-house section drawing 
    • roof plan in house plan view
    • a house door schedule – really a schedule and not a detail
  • That’s usually it.
• However, when it comes to custom house plan details, that’s not it.
• What’s in a custom house plan detail?
  • It’s a drawing most often
    • Maybe dimensioned
    • Maybe scaled
    • Maybe annotated
  • A custom house plan Detail is usually something small – from getting-your-arms- around-it and downwards in size – but not always
  • A custom house plan Detail is something that doesn’t generally qualify in a major sheet for drawing (except, selectively, as an inset or annotation)
    • house framing a complex partition
    • a reference schematic relating several interior or exterior house elevations
    • section of a house exterior, concrete stair abutting a framed exterior wall, etc.
  • A custom house plan Detail is something you’d better draw in order to get it done right because either your materials and method are unusual compared to the norm or the subject itself is unusual
  • A custom house plan Detail can involve a subject, but not often
    • environmental conditions
    • residential interior stairway fire safety, etc.

THE CHECKLIST OF CUSTOM HOUSE PLAN DETAILS

• Here are 22 custom house plan design Details, most not seen by this house designer elsewhere ever
  • Before The Architect uses these regularly, albeit rarely with most all of them in a given dream house plan set
  • Many are one-of-a-kind
  • There’ll be more as custom house designing warrants

1. Stud Wall Reinforcement Detail for Adaptable Custom House Design
   1. Purpose: To fortify selected walls, particularly in bathroom design, prospectively for subsequent, potential application of grab bars without tearing up walls and other clad after closing-in
   2. Content: Intrabay size and centerline height of blocking, sites of blocking, methods and materials for fastening
2. Rebar Laps Detail in Placed House Foundation Footing and House Wall Design
   1. Purpose: To hold corners, intersections, and steps as firmly as possible, especially not overloading interior inflections to fail
   2. Content: Section in house plan view, noting rebar laps
3. Finish Masonry or Wood Floor Clad over Masonry or Wood Floor Substrate House Design Detail
   1. Purpose: To sufficiently associate finish clad to substrate for durability
   2. Content: Section in elevation defining material layers of substrate, often with annotations about method and options
4. Classical Order Detail in a Designer Home Plan
   1. Purpose: To get an Order responsibly represented when clients are moved to really care, which is increasingly the norm in our house designing
   2. Content: Section in house elevation, identifying parts and proportions
5. Wall Frame Detail in a designer house plan
   1. Purpose: To convey method and material for special conditions of wall layout, especially where walls are extensively windowed and doored, and neither the designer nor the clients want to encourage wall wibble-wobble in use, air pressure differential, etc.
   2. Content: Section in house elevation, identifying parts, including fasteners, and dimensions
6. Trim Detail in House Design
   1. Purpose: To define method and material specifically or in finish carpenter latitude of selected details, most often interior casings to house doors and house windows, but also baseboard – particularly base cap – staircase spindle, or baluster, layout, chair rail and cornice trim parts and association, etc.
   2. Content: Section in house elevation, identifying parts and placement
7. Cabinetry Detail in Custom House Design
   1. Purpose: to communicate to cabinetmakers and other sellers the basic configurations of cabinet makeup our clients prefer
   2. Content: Elevations and sections in elevation, identifying cabinet sizes, heights, door swings, drawer by number and site, open bellows, splashes, special trim considerations, etc.
8. Stairway Study Detail in House Plan Designs
   1. Purpose: To be sure that all, especially clients, understand the sectional profile they’ve chosen; namely, whether open above or ceilinged [Stair design and stair construction structure is often extremely difficult to get across to clients without such details]
   2. Content: Section in house elevation, defining in table and to-scale the stair construction metrics, including landings and ceiling run-up if any
9. Stairway Headroom House Plan Design Detail
   1. Purpose: To assure there’s not less than code compliance to stair construction headroom, especially at head landing and upper level overhangs and especially in story-and-a-half designs, and, if not, to make it so
   2. Content: Section in house elevation, paying close attention to head landing and overhangs, especially if unusual adaptation to stair construction structure is required; dimensioned, to scale, and annotated
10. Exterior Stair Detail in House Plan Design
    1. Purpose: To communicate the necessity of sloping both landing and stair treads and the means and method to abut steps or landing, particularly concrete structure, to exterior of perimeter frame wall, and maintaining tread slip resistance 
    2. Content: Section in house elevation: to scale and dimensioned; checking off house elevation levels at abut to structure and at outside, upper edge of landing and stair treads relative to interior house floor level; and layering of materials between steps, particularly concrete steps, and other structure
11. Stairway Frame over Framed Foundation House Design Plan Detail
    1. Purpose: To be clear about the physical relationship – particularly on the vertical – of wall frames on abutting levels or stairs atop one another or both (the stack stair instance being a matter of considerable confusion from time to time in order to line up stairwell walls on the vertical)
    2. Content: House elevation in section, showing alignments on the vertical (or plan view in section, showing alignments on the horizontal), usually scaled, always annotated, being careful to define parts’ abutters and space gaps for unabraded moisture barriers or construction wiggle-room in very tightly designed spaces
12. Exterior Elevation House Design Detail
    1. Purpose: To provide a collective reference to one and all when designer house plans develop several different house elevations – landings, decks, patios, lofts, principal levels, step-ups, step-downs, exterior finish grades markers, etc.
    2. Content: Clearly labeled and dimensioned schematic in house elevation
13. Major Wall Remodel in Home Building Plans
    1. Purpose: To visualize the “after" version of a remodel where interior walls are removed of themselves or to make way for additional space, in either instance newly opened to longer views
    2. Content: Section(s) in house elevation; scaled, dimensioned, and annotated
14. Dormer Structure Detail in Home Building Plans
    1. Purpose: To visualize and, to an extent define for house construction, the physical relationship of a roof dormer either to its own parts or to proximate rooflines and interior space or both
    2. Content: Section in house elevation or isometric either in wireframe or partially shaded, defining major lines of roof eaves, roof ridge, roof overhangs, type of roof dormer ceiling layout, house window well if any, rooflines, etc.; scaled, dimensioned, and annotated
15. Dormer Trim House Design Detail
    1. Purpose: To make sure that certain specifics about roof dormer trim are clearly expressed, e.g., physical relationship of roof dormer eaves to roof eaves, extent of facing roof overhang, recess if any, house window well physical relationship to roof dormer and surrounding rooflines, etc.
    2. Content: Section in house elevation or isometric in wireframe or partially shaded, drawn as clearly as possible the crucial physical interrelationships of studied parts
16. Coffered Ceiling Custom House Design Detail
    1. Purpose: To settle on a coffer layout or optional layouts, paying particular attention to irregular corners, sizing, and symmetry
    2. Content: House plan view, scaled, dimensioned, and annotated, including as needed specifications for residential lighting and house ceiling fan siting
17. Residential Arch Detail in House Plan Design
    1. Purpose: To convey arch type(s), springlines, and minor axes between arches of varying major axes, in order to visualize intended design of appearance, consistency or determined differences
    2. Content: House elevations, scaled, annotated, and dimensioned
18. Dining Area Home Building Plan Detail
    1. Purpose: To get a dining table properly sited and offset and to determine latitude in dining table sizing as required (sometimes the table determines the dining space, sometimes the other way around)
    2. Content: House plan view, scaled, annotated, and dimensioned to identify dining table centerpoint, dining table extents, and extents of unobstructed space for diners and perimeter traffic
19. Exterior Concrete Structure Abut to Framed and Concrete Perimeter Wall House Design Detail
    1. Purpose: To be clear about measures to be taken in regard to house foundation footing and other concrete-to-concrete doweling or similar fastening and separation of the exterior concrete structure from direct contact with the framed wall plane
    2. Content: Section in house elevation, sometimes scaled and dimensioned, always annotated, paying special attention to materials and methods of fastening and layering
20. Courtyard or Other Site Wall Detail in Home Building Plans
    1. Purpose: To visualize elements easily misunderstood in architectural site plans, house foundation plans, other house plan views and in house elevations
    2. Content: House elevation or section in elevation, scaled, annotated, and dimensioned, focusing on materials and methods including but not limited to wall material and application format, height, drainage lets, watertables, gates, etc.
21. Eave Pitch Custom House Design Detail
    1. Purpose: To overcome misinterpretations in styles easily given to several pitches, most notably in variations in soffit depth and site of flares, for example in French Country in several of its presentations [can be of more use to clients than contractors, in order to visualize]
    2. Content: Section in elevation, scaled, dimensioned, annotated, dwelling on pitches, soffit depth, flare site(s)
22. House Foundation Variations in House Plan Detail
    1. Purpose: To act as a primary or cross-reference in complex foundation layouts involving several changes in footing depth, footing width, wall width, wall height, less than total application of masonry shelves, slabs-on-grade, framed flooring, etc.
    2. Content: Section in elevation, scaled, annotated, dimensioned, clearly identify parts, their sizes and physical relationships, with cross-reference to the house Foundation Plan and, in extremes, the house Floor Plans and house Elevation Plans

This author of this Article has choosen to make this article available with free reprint rights.
Click here to copy this article.

►Reprint Rights◄

Log in to become a member of Ralph Pressel's Fan Club!

Comments on this article:
No comments yet.

Was this article helpful to you? Leave a Public Comment or Question: