…but planning is everything.”  –Dwight Eisenhower

It probably won’t surprise you to know that when building a house you need house plans. I posted some pretty ones up here a little while back. But the ones that tradesmen use aren’t nearly so pretty. In fact they are usually cluttered and nearly indecipherable. Looking at examples online is enough to make your eyes cross in double-knots. One of the most thorough, readable (and high resolution) versions I could find was from a company called Randal Southwest. Nice job, guys!

I tried to keep mine to the bare minimum, but eventually you have to tell your framer exactly where to place every board in every wall, ceiling, and floor.

To submit for permits in my locality requires at least 8 different types of plans and drawings. Most of those are plan views where you’ll have three floors worth, or elevation views where you might need one or a dozen to depict what’s needed. My home design program can do a lot of these for me – with some at-times hair-pulling, finicky tweaking. For example, I had to hand-draw in each of the marks for these floor joists and beams, in addition to the various annotations added to the drawing

Other images have to be drawn outside of the program or exported as images and annotated separately. These represent all the unglamorous inner guts of the home we reside in. Perhaps we are better off not knowing how sausages, laws, and thermally efficient exterior building envelopes are made….

I’m actually well behind on getting all these drawings put together. This past weekend I finished all the ones I need to negotiate details with framing contractors. For the city I still need things like the overall site plan, grading and drainage plan, and various detailed section views of complex areas (like those wicked stacked stairs, yikes!) But those can wait just a little longer. Right now I need to line up a framer and get a proper bid for the job so I can go talk to bankers. All that wrangling contractors and talking up bankers is my least favorite part of the job, to be honest. Its too much like my day job. But drawing up all the fine details and doing the research to make sure its right, now that’s more up my alley. Lets hope these plans prove more than worthless.