hi I'm Tom Stevenson I'm a professor of construction management and in this series we're looking at how to read and understand prints for construction drawings we've been looking at residential drawings in previous videos and I've got a series of those videos which are a little bit simpler house today we're going to be looking at one that's a little bit more complex this set of drawings has 19 pages in total it's for production homes on a subdivision so that's a little bit different than just doing a single custom home as you'll see this has two different front elevations for the home so the what that means is that the front of the house is going to look different and the rest of the house will be much the same in production building they like to have repetition it's almost like when you buy a car you can buy so many different models but when you pick that one model you only have a few limited choices of what you can do with it so in production building it's nice if we have only so many different choices of house but they look different from the street so in this particular example we've got two front elevations that are different where the rest of the house is mostly the same and so you can see from this and I'll start with this and we're going to do a few videos on this particular set of drawings we call these the brook drawings they were drawn by Cassidy and Company architectural technologists and we're going to look at different elements today I just want to give you an overview so that you get familiar with the drawings and then we'll dive into some of the unique qualities of the drawings as we go through things okay so let's get started here's the first front elevation I can zoom in so you can maybe see it a little bit better there and so that's the first front elevation you can see that it's got a few Gable roofs it's got an overall Cottage or hip roof on the top a little bit of a hip roof down here hip roof over here and we see this sort of Bullseye window here we've got sort of flat arches with Soldier courses growing atop segmental arch with again busoise that's the bricks that we find in a arch in a brick Arch it's a brick veneer house with a little bit of stone facing likely a manufactured Stone and so that gives it a distinct kind of look to it it's got a little bit of these vinyl shakes that look like wood shingles or shakes on the front all right so you know take a good look you can see that we'll scroll down a little bit and we can see we've got a side elevation here another side elevation and you can sort of see how how the roof is and The Gables are on here then we notice here ah there's another front elevation so this is essentially going on top of or in front of the same overall house there's some differences which will go over but essentially the rest of the house the floor plan of the house is very similar all right and in this case here we've got uh we've got here a soldier course that's going across here and it's got a roll-out course over top of it we got a segmental arch here again with a keystone but we got a flat roof over here that's quite different and we've got one Gable with a hip and another hip roof over here so it is looking quite different than the other house that we just looked at going back to the other house just to refresh you you can see that uh quite different maybe you'll decide you have a preference of one over the other I think maybe my preference is this one because there's a little bit more different things going on maybe some people would say there's too much and other people would say no I really like that so there's there's different choices for the elevations there right but essentially the house is more or less the same so these are the elevations and of course you can see the side elevations because they've got to be different at the front because it is showing the flat roof right it's showing the flat roof intersection and the difference of the roof profiles over here it is also got the rear elevation and it actually has the rear elevation showing where you've got the roof here you've got the patio doors and the various Windows here this looks like it's going to be a window well and we'll look at that later on in the floor plans it has a different choice for a rear elevation and this says upgraded rear usually an upgraded rear in production housing means this this rear they would use if it was like facing a river or a bike path maybe that goes behind the houses a lot of municipalities they want the neighborhood to look really nice so they force the Builder to kind of dress it up a little bit on the rear of the house if it's kind of like not uh you know facing anything they just kind of go pretty plain with it because it'll be the backyard that's all you'll see but if it is we'll do it we'll Jazz it up a little bit more with a little bit deep more detailing with the brick and a lot more detailing on that Gable in so that's not uncommon but this is what we call architectural control that just means that the municipalities the towns the cities that these houses are being built in they want to have some control that the Builder's not just going to do at the cheapest fastest easiest way because the cheapest fastest easiest way is the way they used to do it in the 1950s where you'd have like 75 houses in a row and they're all the same all right might have a few little tiny changes but not hardly any this is making sure that you walk down the street it's like oh a lot of different uh sort of elevations here but you may only have five different our overall house designs and the faces of the house then each one of those five overall designs might have two different front elevations now you got 10 different houses now you can also then mix the materials mix the colors and then you can also Mirror Image some of the houses so they're basically the opposite of what you see and so that gives all these different sort of contrasts and look to it and so you can end up with like 15 or 20 before you really have an exact repeat of the same house and that that helps to make the neighborhoods look much more distinctive so a lot of municipalities do that some don't and you can kind of see it because there's not that much variety like I mean Builders are smart enough to know that they make them exactly cookie cutter it may down uh the value that they can sell them for but generally you want to have some of these architectural controls in place to ensure some Builders don't take maybe advantage of that all right and so these are are done quite well as far as the drawings go and uh I'm in Toronto Canada we do things with metric very often but a lot most of our low-rise residential is done in Imperial measurements so you know like the U.S does everything Imperial we used to decades ago but we converted to the metric system we kind of have this conflict that goes between Imperial and Metric here where we have our building code in metric but our plywood and sheets are four foot by eight foot that sort of thing so I'm going to slide up and I'll probably have to reorient the drawings here so I will reorient them right and this is basically the cover page and it's basically got table it's got a bunch of different calculations it's telling you about the elevations right and the different choices with the elevation and it's giving it in square meters and square feet as I said we kind of have to end up doing things twice a lot and this would be required by the municipality likely that they would want it in square meters different information so it's talking about area for the different elevations so you know if we're looking at the total floor area for the house elevation a is 25 38 25 28 and 25 69 for B so I'll just zoom in on that a little bit so you can see it a little bit better so you can see that it's 25 28 and 25.69 there will be optional doors which is at the side of the house which you've got an option important it also depends on the lot whether you can exit from the side depending whether there's space on the between the house and the property line so those are different choices too and coverage is a building code requirement too as far as zoning goes so how much is the building covering on the lot and there's a whole bunch of different requirements uh in regard to that but you can see there's some slight differences 1542 1557 and that might be just where the roof sticks out or maybe there's a box window or something of that nature that changes the overall coverage so you always look at the drawings too by the title block um the dates that the information is drawn up on the scale that is used in the scale that means 3 16 of an inch to the foot and so that means every every inch that we see on the sorry every 3 16 of an inch on the drawings represents one foot in real life and so everything is is compacted down when we scale and so as long as the drawings are plotted correctly then it should be that you can actually take a scale ruler and you can actually measure things and it should still work out that's another whole discussion for another day on that the scaling and scaling practices and that you shouldn't really be scaling drawings unless you're just doing estimates and if you can be off a little bit it's okay all right so yes and here is the construction notes now typically your drawings will have a set of construction notes and that is your references for detailed information regarding the whole drawings Cassidy and Company does a very neat set of construction notes they pretty much standardize them by sight so that you get used to that cover page the information and where to find it the reference hexagons makes it very easy to locate information so you know you see a hexagon here and it says number five or number seven if I go to number seven here I'm going to find out information that that is pointing towards so in other words the basement concrete slab so that's my reference points following those hexagon symbols that saves you a lot of time so whenever I have a new set of drawings I always take a little bit of time and just take a high level View and that's all I'm doing right now is I'm just taking a high level view how is it organized how is the architect or designer put in references what kind of tables do they have like they got door schedules I see numbers so that's telling me there's going to be numbers where the doorways are and then I can reference back to here to find out what size door is being used and if I know what size door is being used I can take that information and calculate what should the rough opening be if I'm framing that house so that's valuable lintel and beam schedule in the US they would call that header here we call it header two on construction sites even though we probably shouldn't because in the building code we refer to the lintel as the beam over a door window which is very often referred to as the header in our building code the header the only place you're going to find a header is like in a floor right where it's like a stairwell opening so that's important to distinguish between them but here you go lintel and beam schedule and you see all these L's and there's different things there like this is talking about dimensional Lumber two two by eights or two two by tens or three two by twelves this is talking about steel three and a half by three and a half by quarter inch thick angle irons that's why it's got that L shape it's an angle iron and that these are all there because this is a brick veneer house to support the weight of the windows that goes over the sorry the brick that goes over top right so where you see L1 and L7 you have a wood lintel going over top to support the wood framing and you have here you have a steel lintel to support the brickwork over the top of the windows right so that's what all of those are referencing so I'm just going to use how is it being referenced and how is the material listed I've already checked you know the scale that's being used and then I'll usually do what I was just doing with you I would look at all of the elevations I would look at all of the outside elevations like I'm walking around the outside of the house and I would try to get a good understanding of what I'm actually looking at so I will rotate this and so I'm looking at the front of the house here and in the legend with this type you got to be really careful what elevation am I looking at I'm looking at elevation a because the floor plans are going to reference elevation a or elevation B right those are the two elevation a and elevation B so I'm looking at elevation a and so I'm taking a look I'm I'm really taking a good look at the outside of the house like I mentioned earlier and then I'm walking around and this is going to be on the left side right so that's the left side elevation and again it tells you that on the legend and so I'm walking down the side here okay and I see they return the stone down the edge I can see this must be for The Gables and then I'm looking at the right side elevation again it will tell me right side elevation a and I'm taking a good look at this and I go oh this is interesting this mudroom door here uh and we've got some siding material up here remember with elevation drawings you can't really tell depth so I'm not exactly sure is this sticking out or is that recessed in so that I'm committing to memory I wonder what's going on with that and then here's the elevation B stuff and I would again probably I wouldn't look so much at elevation B right now I would continue to look for elevation a stuff so I'm just sliding down here and I'm looking at okay rear elevation A and B all right so I'm looking at this and I'm getting a good sense of because the rear on both of them is pretty much the same it's telling you if the you know you're going to see something different with the roof line for the different elevations there but elevation a would be the solid line I'm going to take a look over here at the plan view now too that just gives me a good perspective So the plan view I can see that Cottage or hip roof on the lower roof portion I can see which direction the roofs are sloping so this is going to be a Gable at the front here I get a good good sense that how the how the roofs are something that's going to be another Gable over here this is coming down from this overall hip roof that you see up here and here and how that transcends along there and again you could transfer back and forth between the drawings to get a good sense of what is happening here's elevation B so in this particular one that is showing me that one Gable over there and so here I've got like more things going on I've got a hip over here I've got a valley coming down I've got this sloping in here I've got that sloping and maybe I'm having you know sometimes when I'm looking at these things this is elevation B over here sometimes I'm getting a little bit confused with what I'm looking at exactly over here so that would be a good opportunity for me to better visualize it to go back and say oh what exactly is going on here I've got this Gable coming across I've got this uh hip part coming across here so so that that means back recessed in there is going to be a valley back in that point um so I could probably pick up some of that if I take a look at the right side view so this is the left side view there it is I can pick up some of that what's happening over here right so that's why this is going to slope down to here this is acting like a valley in here and that's where those roofs are joining up and coming out towards the front so very much about reading construction drawings it's getting used to what you're looking at and referencing and going back and forth with it now I'm going to go back up now for a minute and I'm going to turn it back around and we're going to go down and we're gonna we looked at the construction note so we have a bit of understanding what's in there we don't know everything yet but we know how it's organized we also know if we're confused about symbols you always look for the legend and usually on the legend you'll see if there's anything about the symbols that are being used or abbreviations that are being used on the drawing that can be really a game changer and helpful for you most of these are are standardized but again you have designers that may have special symbols that they use because there's no symbol abbreviation police out there sometimes there's little Nuance differences but if they're using it in their Legends you can be reasonably confident that that's how they're using it in the drawings which saves you a lot of time and hassle so if I look at this floor plan now maybe I'll shrink it a little bit so you can see it out a little bit uh at the big scale and we've got here this is elevation a so when you got a set of drawings that's 19 pages and they got two elevation drawings you better be always checking what is this drawing is this elevation a or this elevation B so this is elevation a and I can see around the outside edge here how the foundation is laid out right and I can see that I have a pilaster here looks like to strengthen the wall because it's such a long wall there so they put this pie last through there to strengthen the wall and I can see that we've got uh window wells around the edges this is saying it's unfinished so you're not going to have any finishes on the inside of this particular basement here so I'm seeing that I'm also seeing some information here that's quite interesting which is I see rebar here and this area here so I'll zoom in so you can see that this area here I see a cutting plane line e in fact I see three I see a I see e and I see B okay so e it means there's a cut through the wall here and I'm not surprised to see rebar going around here because this section of wall here is laterally unsupported that means like there's a stairwell here and the floor which acts as basically it adds rigidity to the foundation walls it supports the walls against the lateral pressure from the backfill in the garage or the backfill against the outside of the foundation wall so it's strengthened everywhere where the floor is but where you have a stairwell open opening it's weak or if you have a big window opening these are small window openings so they're okay but if you have a big window opening then you should be expecting there's probably going to be some steel that's put in the wall to strengthen that wall at that point because it's loud utterly unsupported there so it says there's a cutting plane line so I'm just observing okay there is e right so there is section e and that is showing where the rebar is going that is telling me the size of rebar 320 M Bar that's 20 millimeter bar so that's the diameter of the bar when we're looking at that that's probably about three quarter inch rebar at four foot sorry four inches on Center four inches on Center and that just means those are at four inches on Center you're going to put three of them you're going to place it near the top of the wall and you're going to place it towards the inside because the inside of the wall is going to be under tension pressure against the wall puts the inside of the wall under tension concrete is not very strong when it's under tension so we need to add steel which is extremely strong and those combinations gives us a reinforced concrete wall which is extremely strong so that's what you'll find in in a lot of low-rise residential the overall Foundation walls and the footings they may not need rebar they may depending on geotechnical engineering requirements for the lot they may require it it depends on the depth but oftentimes they may not and again your jurisdiction may be different than where we are but you definitely look for it wherever you see opening so that's something that I always check for you can also see how is this designer put in things like there's dashed lines here and that's representing a three-piece rough-in bath right so this is just showing okay that's a rough in and when it's dashed it means it's optional that means that you know if you want to pay extra they will rough that in for you but if you don't it doesn't get roughed in so that's that's one of the ways that that is being indicated on the drawings we can see here cutting line B There is essentially a grade beam in this and it's got 410m rebars right 10m would be about 3 8 of an inch rebar so essentially they would be placed here again this is to stabilize the garage slab which tends to want to crack and settle very often because maybe the generally this has been filled in very often so it's Disturbed soil hopefully it's been compacted properly because otherwise you get lots of problems still and that's what the grade beam is for Okay so I can slide down here you've got an option then in this case optional finished lower level plan right elevation a so it gives you an option to finish it and then in that case this would be completely finished and have a bathroom over here this part here is unfinished still but this part would be finished so I'm just right now I'm just high level getting a sense of what's going on all right here's my first floor so I've come up the stairs and you know in the basement I'm looking I'm observing this and it says low Headroom that tells me that the ceiling here that little X there is the designer sort of saying this and this and this is not all at the same level of ceiling that the rest of the basement is at so it's like a little flag so I observe that and I think okay of course that's going to be the garage of course that's going to be the front porch but this okay what's going on here low Headroom so what you have here then when you you go up here you've got a sunken mudroom and very often that happens because if you're going to put a door to the garage right it you don't want to have too many steps in the garage you you know down because that's going to take up space and you might not be able to effectively park your car so if you sink this down one or two steps in this case one one Riser that gets you closer to the garage floor right that makes that transition much easier to do so I'm not surprised about that kind of stuff right and so I then take a look around and I'm also noticing oh wow there's these cutting plane lines a a so that's telling me and I'll go back here um well they didn't put it there usually it goes right through and they'll put it through maybe is it here there it is all right there it is because the cutting plane they didn't put for the finished basement all right so I'm learning that as I go through it there's section A A and here is that section A A through the first floor and I'm still in elevation a I'm checking that I've got the right one and I'm looking this over all right so now I'm going to kind of pretend I'm walking through the front door and I'm looking around okay so living room is to my left I've got some sort of column here oh it says 42 inch high half wall so that means that I can't walk straight through there there's a little bit of a wall That's 42 inches up off the floor right probably so I could put a sofa or something against this wall maybe that's why that that's raised up a little bit there here's where the entrance area is and then it says fa I don't know what F A is so I'm going to look at the construction notes and if I went back to the construction notes and I looked at fa I would quickly see that F A is flat Arch right so if I go down here f a flat Arch and to me that means that it's just going to be like a doorway it's going to drop down and it's got like a flat straight Arch going across the top of it okay so again like I said you can reference the abbreviations I'm just getting comfortable familiar with uh the drawings and walking my way through it uh here and let me get to the right page so we're there there we are there's a PR well what does PR mean it means Powder Room you don't have a bathtub or a shower you just have a sink a basin it's proper name for in a bathroom and you've got a toilet again symbols that little symbol there is an exhaust fan again on the construction notes I would see that's that little kind of swirl with the circle that's an exhaust fan and I'm walking through I see dining room on noticing optional coffered ceiling so that's like a bulkhead that goes around for decorative purposes around the outside of the dining room can give it some real look to it especially if you add some pot lights to the right here is the stairs it's got a bull nose on the bottom uh I can see over here that we gotta walkway through over here we've also got a walkway through over here we've got a support column for a beam looks like going across here and sort of here and we also have uh the breakfast area and the kitchen it's got a big island in it well maybe not huge but 36 three foot six by three foot six which would be 42 inches by 42 inches so we've got that we can walk around the kitchen get an idea of the great room there's a fireplace visualizing it visualizing it there's a step down to that sunken mud room and this is how I get to the basement so you're always sort of walking around checking things out oh there's a little desk here a little work area here always walking around checking it out so I go upstairs and in the upstairs come up the the stairs here and I see oh okay this is showing I go down so I would be coming up here there's a little Technology Center probably like a work area for the kids you know for school stuff or it could be a little mini office area so that's that Technology Center could be used for a lot of different things you notice there's a separation between the mass master bedroom and the other bedrooms and they're even not at the same elevation height from the first floor as the Technology Center so we're going to go up four risers here and four risers are down from there it's the same thing for up uh from here to the master bedroom big Master ensuite with a big tub double sinks nice big shower and a toilet and then of course if I turn left oh look closet closet walk-in closet so lots of closet areas here right I'm observing okay this is where the access hatch to the attic will be if I looked at number 23 it would tell me that uh optional direct vent fireplace so you could put a direct vent gas fireplace in there nice big master bedroom coming over here I ca I can come back down go back up uh I can see that there's oh there's a little uh bookshelf Niche there all right and there's a detail for it so I could look for that later uh there's a washer and dryer so this must be for those stacked washer and dryer units that you would stack on top of each other because it's a fairly small closet so that's what would fit in there and we've got bedroom four bedroom three bedroom two and we've also got the shared uh bathroom for the I guess the kids bedrooms uh here and it's got a bathtub probably with a shower vanity and toilet um there water closet as they like to call it so that gives us a I'm getting a good sense of the layout and the space and I'm looking at these sizes you know I'm looking at these sizes it gives me a quick reference here uh you know it's 10 foot by 14 foot 10 uh there so I'm getting a good reference for the size of the rooms and spatially you know you start to want to try to get used to that if you're new to construction like what is 13 foot imagine in it and sometimes it's not bad to just take a tape measure and measure out some of your own rooms just so you start to visualize what is 14 feet what is 17 feet it gives you a really good sort of heads up on things and so with a new set of drawings this is what I always do I'm just looking around I'm trying to visualize what's going on right I'm really trying to get a good handle on the drawings and then in future videos I'm going to talk about really sort of zoning in on specific drawings and looking for information specific to what you need right now to build right so if I'm doing the foundation work I'm looking at the site plan I'm really trying to figure out you know how deep we have to excavate locates setbacks all of that information I'm looking really closely at if we've already got the foundation in I'm really starting to think about the details for the framing and all the components that have to go in I'm also thinking way ahead I'm thinking about doorways and I'm making sure that there's enough Returns on the doorways that there's going to be space to put the casing that you want to put some clients they have a very narrow casing some clients pick a wide casing well if you don't leave enough space then it becomes a problem it doesn't look that nice when you actually finish it so you have to be always thinking ahead too so that's the advantage of visualizing things it helps you to see things as you visualize and as you look ahead makes things a lot clearer from that perspective so it's always good to walk through it and every time you look at it you're going to see new things you might be really impressed with somebody uh you know that that's gone through the drawings of sight super and they they know the drawings inside and out and they're flipping back and forth you know what though they spent a lot of time going through those drawings nobody gets a new set of drawings and it's like well yeah I know that I know I know the easy piece of cake if they do that's a little bit uh too quick you've got to be pretty meticulous with this and you gotta really come to grips with where the challenges are gonna be and then you got to start planning and making sure that certain things are discussed and covered and there's going to be mistakes on the drawings nobody's perfect you want to uh document things that you can't find certain bits of information and then you want to basically um RFI request for information get a response on exactly what you're asking about so it's documented it's clear and then you can move forward from there um so yeah that's our introduction to the brook drawings here and I hope you enjoyed that uh and we'll be doing many follow-ups so if you enjoyed this please click subscribe click the notifications you can click the playlist I have many playlists on my channel from project management planning and scheduling project management tips site management cost control and Microsoft Project as well as understanding construction drawings so I'm Tom Stevenson wishing you a wonderful day and we'll see you next time bye for now