Before The Architect - Articles - "Designing and Drafting Lessons: From The Granite Knee"

Granite Knee Lessons

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RESIDENTIAL DESIGN & DRAFTING LESSONS LEARNED AT THE GRANITE KNEE

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Do you know a swell way to ruin a good day on a house construction jobsite? I do. I’ve witnessed it in the making or underway tons of times: screw up the building plans. There are 3 dimensions to these building plan failures:

	Poor designing
	Poor drafting
	Inattention borne mostly of disrespect for the plans, misunderstanding between folks, the onsite obligation to make builders into designers for lack of the designer's own guidance, outright ignorance of the plans in aspects of design and construction

It's all about the house plans; they've gotta be good and well understood. No house plan's perfect; what this is about is how imperfect house plans can be.

Here are some designing and drafting lessons from a lifetime at the granite knee of experience – personal, storied, observed

Horror stories from times gone by.

Design a while, draft a while, build a while, repair a while, and you’ll collect your own legion of horror stories of house building things gone terribly wrong. Real problems can arise anywhere between the dream of an idea and the deed done. It is my conviction that a well-designed, well-drawn house plan set taken seriously by everyone directly involved – client, designer/draftsman, contractor – would have avoided the lizard list of common residential construction mistakes that I have personally witnessed, among them:

	A few thousand watts on a 15-amp circuit – 10 basement lights, 2 flights of stairway lighting, and L2 lighting overall, 2 bath’s heating lamps, fans, and outlets
	Big headers with butt joints
	Bright nails as fasteners applied to exterior decking
	Toe-nailing used for permanent fastening in lieu of hangers, connectors, and face nailing
	Houses – big houses – built without using a level
	The same concrete steps screwed up not once, not twice, but three times running for lack of adequate footings and reinforcement
	Plans wherein three doors conflict in the same space
	Painting crews hard at it all day in very cold, very dark, very wet houses
	On a rainy day, oak flooring straight off a wholesaler's delivery truck to chop saws and nailers in a cold, damp house
	Drains that'll only draw when water runs uphill
	A builder in my neck of the woods who commonly passes off 8d nails for 10ds and 10ds for 12Ds
	A 6-month old mansion's kitchen floor deflected 5/8" on 4' for inadequate joisting below a huge center island and an unspecified natural stone floor
	A roof over a cathedral ceiling in Maryland that’s been replaced 3 times in 8 years and in its 9^th year is rotting out again, because of persistently inadequate rafter bay ventilation and inadequate rafter bracing
	2 doors at a head landing that not only conflict, but also sweep the travel path
	A garage floor with no pitch
	Footing drains laid atop footings and not beside them
	Insufficient and poorly applied reinforcement – or none at all – to concrete slabs-on-grade
	Plans detailing doors and windows subsequently determined to have been out of production for years
	2"x10" joists notched 8" and unsupported at their bottom of face
	Bearing walls several feet away from subordinate support
	Raised brick and natural stone hearth laid on rough floor over common joists
	Plans so deficient and misunderstood that no one's really sure how the interior slab-on-grade floor got 2 elevations

What Am I Getting At?

What I’m not saying is that the bad wiring, plumbing, framing, masonry, foundation, roof, traffic patterns, lines of sight, kitchen work flows or anything else that’s goes wrong with house construction is entirely on the guy who designed or drew the plans. Could be the guy's a party to it; could be not the only player; could be out of it. Residential construction is complex in regard to materials, means, methods, individual and group interrelationships, the site, the weather, the money, and on and on. There are plenty of opportunities in house building to get it wrong.

What I am saying is that the single, substantive, significant common thread of communication between all these directly related to building a house is the plan set. Takeoffs, materials’ orders, labor and skill level, means and methods of application, physical association of parts both absolute and relative, sequence of work on site, durability of structure, safety of use, convenience of habitation, expectations realized – all these facts and behaviors relate one way or another to the plan set - some causal, some derivative, none casual. Get it mostly right and life is good. Get it wrong, and everyone can suffer. That’s what I am getting it.

In Other Words

There is a vital centrality to building plans: everyone in residential construction communicates based on building plans. All the major players in residential construction focus on building plans – doesn’t matter whether they communicate directly with each other, because they communicate via the building plans.

Let’s check off the major players in residential construction to get this story straight:

	clients (owners) can work with most others except unusually with subcontractors where the actual construction work is done, albeit that owners can be the least familiar with the plan sheets themselves (in the author's opinion, owners should be the most familiar) and that is ruefully and irresponsibly on them, the owners themselves)
	financiers at the very best know only what they can see on plan sheets and that’s it
	building authorities sometimes inspect on plans, sometime don’t, and sometimes don't inspect, and still the plans had most often better reflect at least more commonly recognized codes and common, local building standards
	general contractors use plans as the basis for bidding and letting bids, distributing work and its sequencing, gauging performance of theirs and others and
	subcontractors may rely solely on the building plans, possibly with little or no other direction

So here’s the test –

Q: What is the sole and unique basis for universal communication of building expectation among all those involved in a residential construction project?

A: The plans.

Got it? The plans. The plans. Building plans are the basis for expectation, for necessity, for sufficiency shared among and between all the players in residential construction.

The Lessons

Do it right the first time. Plans that are quickly roughed up for preliminary viewing are drawings susceptible to retaining errors throughout a plan set’s development or to demanding, exhausting corrections on top of corrections later in the project. There’ll be changes enough in any design 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.
Write it on the sheet. We’ve done it both ways with notes – attached them on separate pages of a plan set and written them right on the 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 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.
Identify abbreviations with keys and identify symbols with legends on each sheet. Almost nothing frosts my pumpkins harder than abbreviations or symbols on a sheet without any reference to whassup up with them. Often I can figure out their meanings, but that’s after nearly four decades of experience. Sometimes, I 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 page that has the symbols. Attaching a dictionary of all your scriptings might not play well or long on most jobsites.
Describe important things twice (or more), tied to the drawing itself. This is a lesson about what subs see – usually the sheet that relates to their work. I’ve 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 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 drawing – most can – then show ‘em up on more than one 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 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 plan sheet may be all there is to direct the real work to be done.
Design and draw a full set; the cross-checks rule as among and between floor plan, elevation, ridge-to-footing section, whole-house section, electrical plan, foundation plan, roof plan, etc. - all together must makeup one single, coherent, reconcilable plan set. Until all the plan set sheets are done, none is all done. Details and schedules monitor the drawn plans, verify, validate.
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.
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.
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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