As-Builts: A Peek at the Real Thing

If you've been following the As-Built series in this blog, you're probably expecting to see how all our measuring, jotting and sketching rolled into a final document. I promise the final as-built is coming soon but I came across this and thought this would be a good time to show you a real take-off.

This sketch is my friend's house.  I designed an addition for her birthday, and of course, an as-built was necessary to begin the design.  There are a few things to point out here:

1. This sketch is a mess. If you look closely you will notice some similarities, but it's cluttered and hard to read.  This is what a fact-finding document looks like in the real world.  The examples in this blog are from my book, which I carefully developed as a visual tool.  So go ahead and be messy like this.

2.  When I'm measuring for as-built drawings I want to just get it over; it shouldn't take more than an hour.  You'll notice that some of my dimensions are in inches and some are in feet. I like to jot down measurements in inches when I'm measuring in the field.  I don't spend a lot of time looking the tape measure up and down, I just look at the inches and bam, I'm onto the next measurement. Then I can convert my measurements in feet/inches with a steaming cup of coffee, where I'm less likely to make a conversion mistake.

3.  This was the extent of my notes.  I didn't need to go back to her house to get any additional information.

So there you go!  I'd love to see your plan sketches. Leave me a comment and we'll post yours too.

As-Builts: Plumbing and Stuff

This weekend blog is about those semi-permanent elements in a house, such as cabinets, appliances and plumbing fixtures.  It's useful to locate these things on our as-built drawing because it will help us make decisions down the road.

For example, let's say we want to remodel the kitchen. If we can upgrade the kitchen and locate the new sink and hot water heater in the same location, we'll save money (otherwise we'll need to have a plumber reconfigure the supply and waste for the sink, as well as the hot water heater supply and distribution).  Or maybe the kitchen is the most important thing and we just bite the bullet, wipe the kitchen slate clean, and design a whole new kitchen.

So go ahead and draw the upper and lower cabinets (it will help to know how many linear feet of storage space we currently have) and then measure and draw those appliances (the refrigerator, the dishwasher, the stove and the oven, if they are separate).

We also need to locate the plumbing fixtures in the bathroom: the sink, the toilet and the tub.  We may as well include the built-in bookcases, since they are also semi-permanent.

That's it; we're done. Sort of - at least the investigative part.  Next time we'll take all this information that we've gathered and draw the final, real as-built drawing.

As-Builts: Sneaky Permanent Things

You very hard last week and you've earned this week's easy blog.  So far we have located all the walls, doors and windows; we have just a few more things to nail down, so to speak. 

Today we'll locate any other permanent elements that may need to be considered for future planning.  In this example, we've added the exterior porches and the fireplace.  These kinds of elements are pretty substantial and we may want to incorporate them into a future design, or get rid of them entirely.

Another new element in our drawing is the furnace.  This house is older and the heat is an oil furnace, so there is a big hole in the hallway floor with a grill cover.  These things used to creep me out when I was a kid, but that's a different story.  This element is more or less permanent.  It seems like no big deal, and it could easily be overlooked.  It could be an issue later, however, if we designed a new layout and wanted to put walls there. 

Your homework assignment is to look around your house, inside and out, find all the permanent elements and add them to your drawing.  And carve a pumpkin.  The pumpkin has nothing to do with as-built drawings, of course.

As-Builts: I've got your number

We start to get down to business now- just a little - don't panic.  Here's what we're going to do:

Today's blog is about measuring all the doors and windows.  It's simple, really.  We've already located everything in the drawing, we just need to measure a few things and then add the measurements to the drawing.

Let's start with the easiest one - doors.  Most residential doors are 6'-8" tall.  Seriously.  Of course there are exceptions, for example, entry doors are sometimes taller.  Anyway, architects usually just specify the width of the door, unless the door is a non-standard height. That is why you only see the width of the door on the drawing.

Windows are not that much harder to measure - architects will note the width and the height of the windows on drawings.  If you want to roll like the architects there are a couple of things that you need to know:

1. When you note window dimensions you always put the width measurement first, then the height measurement.

2.  Measure the opening of the window in the wall. There may be a lot of other stuff there, trim and so forth, but go ahead and measure the wall opening; you can fine-tune later, if you really need to know. (When would you need to know? Oh, say you want to upgrade your windows with more energy efficient windows...)

So there you go. Measure and jot.  You've already come a long way.

As-Builts: When Do We Get To Windows?

Are you sure you're not an architect?

Yes, today is all about windows - just where are they in our rooms? Just like doors, we want to draw windows approximately where the are in the walls.  I like to draw my as-built windows as skinny boxes on the wall, but it doesn't matter - whatever works for you, as long as you know it represents a window.

It can get a little confusing if you have a bank of windows and how you handle that is up to you. You can locate each window next to each other or lump them together as one big one. Don't worry - you aren't making any big mistakes here.

As-Builts: You're a-door-able

Have you ever added up the number of doors in your house? Me neither - at least not until now.  It took me less than a minute to walk through my house and just add up the number of doors.  Easy enough.

Each room in your house has a door (or maybe just an open doorway), and we want to show these doors on our floor plan.  At this time we don't need to be super careful, we just want to place the door approximately in the right spot in the wall.

Architects draw doors as shown on the plan and there are two parts.
 - There's the flat side, usually shown perpendicular to the wall that it is attached to, which represents the door. 
 - The curve (or arc) represents the sweep of the door swing. When you draw your doors, be sure to draw the doors the way they really open - do they swing open to the inside of the room or the outside of the room?

When you're finished drawing your doors, just count them to be sure you got them all.

As-Builts: Let's Box.

Architecturally speaking, most people live their lives in little boxes.  Living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, and hallways are essentially boxes that are configured together and fill up the space we think of as a house.  If we think of rooms as being just boxes, it's easy to see how these individual boxes add up to develop the complete floor plan.

All we want to do today is locate the walls within your house. In my example, the living room is the biggest room, the bedrooms are smaller, the kitchen is even smaller and so forth. It doesn't have to be exact, all we want to do at this point is locate the walls that separate the rooms. If you can approximate the size of the rooms, that's great, but you don't have to.

But wait - maybe you're wondering if this is true - is the biggest room really the living room? Good catch. You'll see next time.

Now, what about your walls?

As-Builts: Measuring the Exterior

Fall is in the air and the-end-of-summer rains have started in Seattle - better get some quick measurements before the rain really sets in.

We want to get some overall exterior dimensions before we focus on the interior, which is where we will spend most of our as-built drawing time.  In this case, the shape of the house is just a rectangle so I just jotted down the length and width measurements. If the shape was different - say an "L" shape, we should dimension the length and width of each section of the space.

By the way, I recommend measuring any structures that are attached to the house, such as a garage or carport. The information just might come in handy later.

Your homework assignment is to go outside and measure the length and width of your house, and add this information to your as-built sketch.

As-Builts: Square One

As-builts are so handy - I think everyone should have one.  Whether you rent or own, sooner or later you will probably want to buy furniture or a rug or something and it's so smart to have information about the space you want to put said proposed stuff into.   These drawings are a wonderful reference - I mean really, don't you wish you had a set of drawings for your house right now?  Creating your own set is simple and you will learn all about your house.  All you need to start is a note pad, something to write with, a tape measure and a friend to hold the other end of the tape.

The first thing architects do when they start a project is develop an as-built.  To do this they visit the site, sketch, take careful measurements, and snap a lot of photos.  Architects do this because they need to know what they are starting with before they start designing anything - whether the project is new construction or a remodel.

Architectural drawings can look overwhelming if you aren't familiar with reading them, so I'll demonstrate how to develop a set of as-builts, with sort of a Sunday paper comic approach so every step will be easy to follow.  The graphic illustrates the first step - draw the basic shape of your existing house on a sheet of paper.  (I like to use grid paper but letter or legal paper is fine too.)  Our sample project will be a rectangle - based on the project in my book Drawing Home, One Story Additions.

Your homework assignment is to draw the shape your house. If you just can't figure out the shape of your house, here's a hint: go to Google Earth, type in your address to see the shape of your house from a few hundred feet up. Draw that.