HOME BUILDING PLANS
BEFORE & AFTER -
HOUSE PLANS - COVER SHEET
"Good designs let you, bad designs make you." AG
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BEFORE
If there is one at all, the other guys’ cover sheet could look more or less like this:
BEFORE, HOUSE PLAN COVER SHEET, in PDF
It’s simple and straightforward, and if you didn’t know what you don’t know about house plan set contents, you’d be a happy camper. You’d look at the fancy banner on the right-hand side of the cover sheet, a copyright statement, and get on with it.
What do you know? The plan set is 10 named sheets long. Thin bones. Scrawny.
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AFTER
Here’s a cover sheet recently prepared by Before The Architect:
AFTER, HOUSE PLAN COVER SHEET, in PDF
Big dif. Big house plan set. All the better to build with.
House plan sets from Before The Architect most often are large, running roughly 2-dozen sheets or more, sometimes twice that, or nearing 50 sheets even for the one Before The Architect's desktop as this webpage is being written.
What do you know?
 | 14 sheets of Specifications (usually this house plan set segment runs to 8 or 9 sheets, but this one plan set was stretched out to let individual trades - e.g., foundation contractors, framers, electricians, etc. – get their own sheets of specifications). |
| 9 sheets of Details – tables (defined subsequently) and drawings of isolated elements needing more description than otherwise permitted in broad-area drawings. |
| 5 sheets of Elevations – for a 4-sided house, Before The Architect added a 5th sheet to portray a large part of a house façade covered up by a detached garage – so one sheet of that house face with the garage and one without. |
| 4 sheets of Foundation plans – (usually not so many on smaller houses) covering the house and garage separately, otherwise there was too much info to get on a single sheet without dropping the font’s point size to miniscule heights. You’ll see for yourself that this Foundation plan, especially for the house itself, is complex and needs its own space. Additionally, Before The Architect suggests how this slab-on-grade L1 for both house and garage with breezeway might better be segmented for contraction joints. |
| 2 sheets of Ceiling Plans that leave little to the finish carpenters’ imaginations, but leave some leeway for owner-craftsman on-site creativity. |
| 1 sheet for Floor Framing, because there is only one floor to be framed in this slab-on-grade two-story. Here’s where suggestions can be passed to truss manufacturers and hand framers about evenly distributed and concentrated loads, about bearing walls, about special considerations of beaming and the like. (Virtually all of the floor and roof framing from Before The Architect goes to truss manufacturers these days – for floors on account of extensive clearspans, for roofs on account of owners’ preference to get on with a construction and the dwindling number of real carpenter craftsmen capable of executing more complicated roof designs.) |
| 2 sheets of Roof Plans – 1 each for house and for garage. |
| 4 sheets of Electrical Plans, 1 each for the 2 levels of the house, 1 each for the garage main floor and for the garage attic utility area. You will be able to judge on your own later on about the extraordinary completeness of Before The Architect electrical plans, including critical spacing for luminaires, lighting control for long-term safety, etc. |
| 2 Whole-House sections. Generally standard fare. |
Please take note, too, that Before The Architect alerts all that there's work to be done by others in re the plan set and that a specific building code is recognized in the plan set's construct.
That's a lot of house plan.
That's Before The Architect.
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