“BLUE” Prints ??

They are called Construction Drawings these days. Essentially, they are the IKEA assembly instructions for your home, if you will. 

They used to be reproduction prints, negatives of pencil or ink drawings - white lines on blue background, a method used for a century until the early 1940’s. The use of rancid ammonium in the process, a smell that still lingers in the nostrils of many design folks, stayed around when the reproduction methods turned to black lines on white paper. At the end of the last century we figured out how to simply print in larger sizes.

Even though design methods in the building engineering industry have been offering 3D modeling, in the US residential market the creation of a home still pivots around a roll of paper drawings. The originals are created either using 2D CAD (Computer Aided Design) or 3D BIM (Building Information Modeling). In either case, we still spit out sheets of two-dimensional renderings to communicate the make-up of your home.

What do they show?

The most common size for these sheets of drawings are 2 feet by 3 feet. Usually the pages are filled with the following:

• Site Plan (placement of you home on the site)

• Exterior Elevations (the outside look of your home)

• Building Sections (picture cutting through a cake and seeing the interior layers)

• Floor Plans (looking down from above into each space of your home)

• Wall Sections (slices through walls showcasing their make-up)

• Building Details (closer look at how materials get sized and attached to each other)

• Foundation Plans (how does your home meet the ground and sit on sturdy feet?)

• Framing Plans (what are the sizes of all the sticks and where do they go?)

• Structural Details (calculations and specifications to ensure you home will hold up)

• Interior Elevations (the layout of built-ins, cabinetry, kitchens, and baths)

• Door and Window Schedules (how many doors, their sizes, and details)

• Interior Finish Schedules (tile, exposed concrete, painted drywall, wallpaper, or gilded stenciling?)

• Electrical Plans (where do all your lamps and ceiling fans go?)

• Utility Plans (are the ducts and plumbing lines accounted for?)

• And lots of notes, dimensions, and calculations

What are these drawings for?

To the uninitiated these drawings tend to look like sewing patterns. However, they serve multiple entities for multiple purposes. Of course, the design team uses them as a means to both keep track of all their brilliant ideas, but also to work out the detailing of their designs. Through them they also address building codes and zoning guidelines. The drawings should also serve homeowners as a graphic representation of the structures and spaces designed for them. They are passed on to the appraisers of banks that might finance the construction of a home and to county building departments, who review them for code compliance in order to issue building permits. Most importantly they find their way to the general contractor for pricing and planning, and their building crews and trades to execute the construction.

In short they spell out how to build your home and how it should look in the end to everyone involved. For that purpose it is important they are graphically clear and specifically address the concerns of each entity involved. Therefore it is paramount for the design team not only to possess a knack for graphic representation, but also a deep insight into the concerns of everyone working on your home. These drawings are the pivot point around which the creation of your home is organized. The design leads up to the setup of these drawings and the design execution refers back to them, all the way to the day you move in.

If you want to ingratiate yourself with your design team, refer to them as “Construction Drawings”. “Blueprints” tend to sound like an anachronism to most.

~ Toby