Understanding Construction Drawings

hi i'm tom stevenson and welcome to understanding construction drawings in this series we're going to learn about print reading how do we read and interpret construction drawings if you're interested in construction project management or any area within that from the trades other areas please subscribe to my channel and click notifications so you'll see as new videos come up in this series so as i mentioned today we're going to be diving into a site plan now this particular site plan is one that i actually used in my book called understanding construction drawings for housing and small buildings this particular model and this is available on amazon this particular model of house is a corner lot house so in video number one or lesson number one in this series and you can check my playlists if you want to go back and look at the previous videos or click notifications for upcoming videos the previous video we looked at the doncaster drawing which was actually a model house that was just down the street from this now a site plan is taken from a legal survey and it shows where the building is going to go on the particular property so it positions it or cites it on the particular property so it should show where the basically the property boundaries are it should show setback amounts setback is how far is the building set back from the property line and it should provide information about finished grading and finish grading is designed so that water will run away from the buildings and it will be directed towards some sort of drainage system it may be directed towards swales which are indentures in the ground that are directing the water away from the building which will either eventually bring it to a tributary a river or it may bring it into a storm sewer on the street or somewhere else that it's been located to gather that water and redirect it away from the area if they don't do that then what typically would happen is you'd have un unpredictable accumulations of water that would form and perhaps flood out neighborhoods that previously were fine before you started building this subdivision of multiple houses so we always want to be cognizant of that and each city and town will have particular particular zoning requirements that revolve around ensuring that the grading is going to be done properly certain code requirements that ensures that certain safety minimum requirements are being met all right so let's take a look at this i'm just going to zoom out a little bit i'll zoom in again in a few seconds but to zoom out you'll typically have like a site plan now it could be on you know it depends on what you're doing if you're doing a condominium development it's going to be on much bigger sheets of paper a typical size like for a house might be 11 by 17 that's only because it's easier easy to reproduce if you're printing it to be honest i prefer the digital my eyesight's not as good as it used to be and i can zoom in and zoom out uh very very quickly but it is nice to have big drawing sets so you get a good sense of what's going on i like to have both to be honest as you can see i've got some drawings behind me but i also have the digital copies for those drawings so that i can review them and as i'm a professor of construction management i've built you know and been involved in hundreds of projects over my career and still in a consulting capacity working in that area i like the advantage of both and of course with 3d models i like that even better when you have a 3d model of the terrain you have basically an orthographic view which is what this is it's a flat straight on orthographic view most of our actual issued for construction drawings ifc issued for construction drawings are going to be in orthographic form flat straight on views because we can put information on it and we can zoom in and zoom out we can put measurements on it we can put what we call elevations on it and that makes it very easy then for us to lay things out from that but models are very good for visualization purposes as you'll see as we go further into the series visualization plays a big role in being able to be excellent at constructing buildings and looking at a drawing and in your mind visualizing what's going on so maybe that's what we should start to do let's visualize what's going on in this site plan here so it's as we zoom in here well before i actually zoom in so i've just zoomed in you can kind of see this is a corner house because you've got a street here and you've got a street there right uh you know if i zoom out a little bit again you should see that we've got a compass direction showing north and of course if we have a north direction we could easily then figure out where is you know west and where is east right so we can get that and where is south and so of course that is our north direction they'll only ever give you north so if you're directionally uh challenged as it's easy for some people to have that uh where they have a little bit of directional challenges my daughter sometimes has trouble figuring out left and right hands which always does this for left uh never eat shredded wheat going clockwise or this spells we when you know the north so just different ways that you can remember that that can be helpful for you under those purposes all right and the other thing that i wanted to show you next is we've got this overall outline here always look at the legend so what does the legend tell us well the legend and i'll zoom in on this so you can see it better the legend gives us a lot of information it gives us a lot of symbols that will be used on the drawing so these are important they tell us what the symbols are and they may also give us abbreviations in my experience you can't count on these being the same for all your projects now i am i do know you know with this particular designer cassadine company this is pretty much the symbols they'll use standard so they've got everything they're you know they're a very big uh architectural uh company and they do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of homes and so they've standardized their processes but that doesn't mean that a different designer doesn't have slightly different you know for the most part they're similar but my experience always look at the legend that's provided with the designer and the nice thing is if you're working on the subdivision you might be working on this subdivision building hundreds of homes over the next five ten years you'll get used to this standard but then if you go on a different subdivision and it's a different designer you've gotta get used to their ways of doing things just the way it is but you've got abbreviations like finished floor elevation top of basement wall basement floor elevation these are very important because they will tell you for example if you're talking about underside of footing at the garage underside of footing at the rear of the house just underside of the footing at normal normal elevation points that's how far you have to excavate in relation to a benchmark and a benchmark is a standard elevation that is provided based on mean sea level coordinates and it's used because when we talk about drainage systems storm water drainage systems drains from the house etc they have to have a fall to them so there has to be basically a gravity fall to them and everything has to be coordinated but you also need that so that you can reference and you can design out a subdivision with the grading to ensure the water is directed where you need it to go so understanding elevations and visualizing elevations is very important in fact just the last few days i've been getting a lot of landscaping work done on my house and you know i was looking at the drawings and because i had this excellent designer that did the the landscape drawings but visually i knew that uh where it said one step i knew there was going to be a requirement for two steps and so when the landscape contractor was there no it should be okay and i go no i don't think so because i can look at it and i can visualize it and then so of course they took out their uh instruments and their total station and they were checking it and there's oh you know what you're right it would be much better we've got to put a second step because you want the water to fall away from the building you don't want to go to all that trouble and have it not work well you have no choice as a builder because the regulatory authorities are going to make sure that you have that fall away from the building so all of these symbols like elevations are important for those reasons and that's why you also will see things like it'll say proposed elevation and existing elevation in lesson three i plan to use a commercial drawing that we'll look at so the upcoming lesson that i'll post in another week or so will have a existing elevation and proposed elevations this only has the proposed elevations these particular drawings here which is the finished grade elevations of when you complete the project all right but if it showed something like a number in brackets that would be telling you oh wait a minute that has an existing elevation i don't think there's any on this drawing but you never know we might come across it as we go through it together all right so we'll go through these different elements where they are on the drawings or if they occur on the drawings uh you'll also notice it says scale nts not to scale i'll spend another session on that coming up on scaling of drawings and what you have to know and what you have to be careful of usually the date is important you want to make sure you're working with the most current date i've sort of whited that out because dates always change etc and so these are important elements and you can sort of see usually there's a list of uh drawings that are been listed for these requirements usually there'll be dates and you'll just want to have some way this gets into more project management and site management some way of organizing the drawing so you have a hierarchy that you know you're working with the most current set of drawing because you don't want to be doing something if something's changed you don't be doing something off the old drawings like i just said with my landscape contractor well if we discuss that we're going to put a second step and it gets redesigned and then somehow the communication to the site leader gets misplaced then they're going to start laying it out and excavating for one step instead of two steps and then that's going to cause a lot of problems down the road so currency of drawings is important that's where a lot of the productivity software is like field wire blue beam pro core plan grid these types of tools are very helpful because they can have a way of managing those documents and you know when you're looking at the most current one and it's live and dynamic static systems are like when you print something and it's like something changed and it wasn't printed that's a big problem so in construction we have to be mindful of that that we have systems in place all right getting back to our drawings here we have this plot plan it's on a corner lot so usually what i like to do is visualize what am i looking at here because you might be looking at that and saying i don't know what he's talking about here i don't exactly get uh what he's referring to right and so what i usually like to do is i usually like to highlight where the actual property is and where the actual house is so maybe you want to just freeze this for a minute or even just take a look at it before i talk about it and see if you can see the outline of the house where the garage is and where the property lines are that's always helpful for you to try to do this before i show you because then that gets you thinking on those things so i'll let you pause that and take a good look at that if you will uh it's always good when you figure these things out just remember that and so the property line is basically coming along here it's coming down it's whoops it's coming down this line here all right it's going to come down straight down this line all the way on the west side right it's going to come across the back and then it's just going to go up that straight line there so that's going to be basically the oops i went a little bit off there it's going to come straight down that line over here right so that's the property line maybe i can get a little bit different color for the um house so let's try the house now so this here is the edge of the house it's coming around it's coming here it's coming down here and this right here is the porch so there's like this nice porch on this house that comes down you can sort of see the steps there and it's coming down and around it's going down and it's going to go straight across here we got that there and it's just going to go straight up um that line that's right beside the east property line right so you can sort of see how that encircles the building a little bit awkward with my mouse here but you can see where the house outline is and that's important to distinguish where is the house where is the property lines you've got to get that stuff down right off the bat all right so here now you would have the full construction drawings but i can intuitively look at this and understand that this it says ufg for one so there's a clue underside of footing gar which would mean underside of footing garage right so i can get that that means that the garage and i'll zoom in maybe a little bit more for you the garage is following this outline i'll use a different color here it's a little bit bright maybe but it'll do the purpose so the garage is doing this outline here all right and so you know i can overlap it here i guess you could say because that'll be where the garage door is at the front all right so the garage is contained in this area part of the building right i'm not saying it's not part it's it's connected it's inside um but uh it's good to know that because you can see here you've got a spot elevation 112.21 you see a little x that's a spot elevation see a little x over here right and it says 111.96 so what that means is and we're in metric on this so this is looking at meters being canada it's meters yours might be you know it might be a hundred and ten point five feet and it might say a hundred and nine point five feet over here if it was in imperial same idea doesn't change that way so you've got one 112.21 111.96 series of measurements doesn't matter it's just what you're using for your elevations generally speaking though when you're talking about site plans and surveys they're done in decimals as opposed to construction drawings which in metric they are done in obviously millimeters in imperial they're done in feet inches fractions of an inch right so in canada even though our building code is in metric uh usually residential drawings i would say uh the majority of them are done in imperial and that's because we ship most of our goods like plywood uh you know drywall and stuff to the us so we probably ship 10 times what we manufacture to the u.s so we don't really just change them up because metric sheets are slightly different than imperial sheets so it doesn't really matter in this case 112.21 that's the elevation here and 111.96 so that tells me that there's a difference of 25 which really it's talking about a difference of 250 or 0.25 meters right so really it's talking about a difference of two five there's about 25 millimeters in an inch 10 inches so there's a fall from basically the garage to the sidewalk of about 10 inches and that's 10 inches over this distance from here to here right so that's okay that's fine because we want to have the water run away from the house and that's why it's saying there's a 4.34 percent uh slope so what that would mean is that way i always look at it when it's given as a percentage very easy to visualize that's the first thing you want to do you want to be able to visualize something like that so what you can think about from uh that perspective is if you have a hundred inches right it's four point four point three four inches to nothing over a hundred inches that's the way to think about it so you know you're thinking about uh eight foot four inches 100 inches right 96 plus four well i got 4.34 inches down to nothing so over that length of 100 inches one side's 4.34 the other side is nothing that gives you the slope and now you understand what the ratio is and what the slope is because a lot of people i've found in construction when you say a two percent slope or you say three percent slope you're like yeah an inch and a half i get it no it's not an inch and a half not if it's 20 feet long or what have you it is two percent two inches on a hundred inches so if you got two in 200 inches overall it better be 4 inches because you're going 2 inches and 2 inches so you have to think about it in those terms because it can make a big difference ok so we have that understanding of slope and we understand that these are spot elevations uh they're based on a benchmark based on mean sea level which it would be at basically zero so mean sea level might be 500 miles away right or more depending where you're located might be just down the street if you're if you're next to the ocean but these are how those are calculated and so partly because the storm sewers and the sanitary sewers a sanitary sewer is what takes the waste from the toilet storm sewers might be taking water from downspouts it might be taking clean water from weeping tile that is going around the house etc if it's you know if you have to have a waterproofing done because there's hydrostatic pressure on the foundation water pressure high water table it may be taking water away from around the foundation um so that's clean water this goes straight into the rivers and lakes this goes to a treatment facility where it's treated before it gets uh put back into this ecosystem you'll notice here this sort of track here well that's a sidewalk so that's a sidewalk and that's that's what that's referring to this would be a little bit of a boulevard here probably some grass this here is a hydro transformer right so you got a hydro transformer over uh here so where is the symbol for that just so that we can see it there it is transformer right so that means your electricity is below ground there's not hydro poles and that's a transformer this little cross pattern here is a street light so that's referring to that that's a street light sometimes the symbols don't 100 match what they show but that's what that is in this case this here is a catch basin you know the sewer grate that you think about we call it a catch basin catches all the water that's flowing down the street and water that's flowing down the driveway would also go back to there and then it's redirected remember that these systems and drainage for a subdivision is designed on hundred-year worst storms with a factor of safety built in so that it should be able to have the capacity not very frequently of flooding things right we have to be careful how we design for 100-year storms with climate change and things like that i think new york city's had three hundred year storms in like 10 years so that changes the calculations right all right uh setbacks so this is 10.05 meters set back from the rear property line or you could say from the south property line right so this is the property line on the south side uh we have a setback over uh here of 3.87 meters so you have to look very carefully um from where it's going to so you see the tick mark here and there's another tick mark there so it's 3.87 meters from the property line here to this edge right so you have to be very careful where the slashes are and where it's going from and where it's going to from that perspective so that you can accurately see what the measurements are and then you see this it's 13.58 meters from the back of the house right on the south side to the most extreme northerly part of the house it's not stopping here it's not stopping there it's going straight through to here right so that you got to follow that you got to be very careful about where it's going to and from right and that's also where if you had you know if you wanted to scale it to confirm it you could do checks um that can be helpful if you think that you've got something messed up or you're not 100 sure that can always be helpful for that i'll talk about scaling in another example video okay so we've got those setbacks we can see here very carefully you see those two little slashes maybe i'll zoom in a little bit more for you so you can see a little bit better so you see those two little slashes there well that's 0.35 meters so that's 350 millimeters right when you're showing something in meters and you want to convert to millimeters you have to move it three places one for decimeters one for centimeters and one for millimeters so that's the same as saying 350 millimeters right so you're looking at about 14 inches or so there and that is going from the property line here to the house on this side it's 1.25 when they can fit the measurement between they will fit the measurement between when they can't fit it they'll put it to the side so that's important to note as well and you can see there's a spot elevation there 112.27 there's a high point it says 112.12 which is lower than this but this is the high point for the swale see these arrows those are swales those are little curves you don't want the water to go against the house you want to go from the side of the house down to the middle so from each house it slopes down right and then it's redirected some of it is redirected from the high point in this direction you see the arrow because that's going to take it out this way and eventually out to the sewer or catch basin and then it's also going to take it out this way down through the south side and then you see a swale along the back of the lot see there's another house over here that you don't see the water is also sloping back towards there and it's going to redirect this way so that some will go out to the street and it's going to redirect this way and then you can see another redirection taking that that area so there must be a slope outward that way in this particular case so you follow the swales and you get a good sense of how the water is to flow and then you get the elevations and then when it's being laid out and graded then basically they are checking to make sure that they're filling it in so that they're making sure that those slopes are going to take place so that's what's going on there we have here it says uh the finished floor 112.72 top of basement wall 112.48 right we've got underside of footing is 110.02 and b f what was bf basement floor elevation yeah this one because i usually don't pay too much attention to that one it's really going to be based on where you're uh basically where your top of footing is so underside of footing is one ten point zero uh two and so then from there you know what if i know the underside of my footing is 110.02 and i know my finished floor is 112.72 i can with a section detail i can start adding stuff up and i'll show you that in another video as well where you basically take the thickness of the footing you take what the finished floor is supposed to be that's going to give you the height of the wall you're going to have a sill plate you're going to have a floor joist you're going to have a subfloor and that would be your finished floor height when it says finished floor it means to the subfloor doesn't mean to the top of the ceramic tile or to hardwood flooring everything is to where you frame your structure to uh typically there's always these exceptions but typically all right and we have here a sunken landing so that means when you there there's an opportunity here that you could have a door it's not showing that but if you see the actual drawings for the whittington there's an opportunity to have a door through from the garage and usually you want to have a sunken landing usually one riser because that will you know sunken landings usually one riser or two risers in the house and then you've got one riser down to the garage floor this is showing you basically you've got that sunken landing and you've got that option for a doorway of course they charge you extra if that's the case but that's where that information is coming from and so and that if you look at this this is what 0.53 and this is 0.36 so it's a little bit less than 200 millimeters probably at close to 7 inches or so then that would be a typical step there so that's what that is over here you can see four risers so that means you're going to have four steps down and it says walk out deck it doesn't show the deck in this particular drawing but there would be a walk out deck and then you would have four risers down four risers that's the vertical component of a stairs the treads are the horizontal component so if you have four risers you got three treads and actually this is four risers so that would be typically one riser from the house to the deck and then three risers down to the ground these things sometimes they're like i said even with my own landscaping drawings sometimes they're off by you know one riser but it gives you a really should be very close to that if everything's been done well and properly then there's other things that are symbols that you have to get used to you know like what is this and what is this well this is showing a fence right and this is showing a gate i guess in the subdivision i think in this particular case um they would typically put in a fence and a in here we have and that's the direction that the gate would open that would be what we call a right-hand gate um i'll talk about that in another uh episode on floor plans but this is what is that well i don't know let's take a look so if i go down and i take a look the only thing that's got this here is what they call a super mailbox and that's what that is referring to being a corner house there's a community mailbox and usually it's bigger than that it's usually a little bit longer than that so i'm not quite sure why they showed it just square like that but that means that there's a bunch of boxes here and that means the neighbors come up and they get their mail from here if you live there you might not think it's so super everybody coming up uh on your part of the the lawn and that sort of stuff uh to get it because it's not really your part uh but um that's where that would be located for that reason all right uh and this here is a sidewalk that goes around to the front of the porch and these are posts that will support the roof over the porch that is coming into play we can see the side yard setbacks so this would be from the west side of the property line and so this is 3.65 meters to here this is 2.15 to the edge of the step that's coming down so you can see it's giving you the different you've got setbacks from this side from this side from the front from the back you've got the overall length of the building at its longest point from outside to outside you've got the width of the building with at its widest point so that's from here so look where the extension line is this is an extension line this is a dimension line and look where it goes to it goes to over here right so we're going from there to there across here 11.2 meters it's not going to the edge here right this little point is telling you four risers down right you got one two three risers and like i said the fourth riser is from the floor to the porch and then you're going down three risers from the porch that's where you're looking at it that's how you need to think about it all this stuff ties in uh together right it's very important you don't want to end up with the first floor that is lower than the ground outside i'm not saying that never happens but it's definitely not ideal it's not what you want to have happen there's usually some sort of real unusual circumstance going on with the grading uh in that particular example but you know 99.9 of the time you want to make sure that the first floor is higher than where the grade is it doesn't have to be hugely higher but as long as it's higher you know there's barrier-free access that comes into design making sure that the elderly can easily access things less risers like if it's a bungalow in those cases is more fundamentally important but still we want to be up a little bit we can have a ramp a you know low slope ramp for barrier-free access all right so i think that's pretty much what i wanted to get across uh in this particular uh video we will have upcoming ones more on this we will revisit this because it does take a little bit of practice to get used to looking at these drawings and understanding what is going on but you know we went from something that's just a bunch of lines to getting a good understanding of you know there's two streets here it's a corner lot this will be the actual curb that goes around there's a sidewalk probably a good five foot uh wide sidewalk or six foot wide sidewalk here's a fairly narrow sidewalk from going around the house probably like 30 inches or so that's going around to the front uh door here's the garage these are spot elevations this is a high point over here this is a swale that's going in each direction if you want to visualize swales and some of the other things a little bit better go back and look at my lesson one it should pop up i'm going to put a reference to it on the pop-up coming up shortly and look at my playlist and please subscribe as we go through this and you learn more about reading construction drawings from housing and small buildings and the book has literally hundreds and hundreds of questions and that's how you practice and you see how you're doing you look at the answers and that sort of thing so i hope this has been helpful for you i'm tom stevenson wishing you a wonderful day and we'll see you next time and don't forget to leave a comment and to subscribe bye for now

hi i&#39;m tom stevenson and welcome to understanding construction drawings in this series we&#39;re going to learn about print reading how do we read and interpret construction drawings if you&#39;re interested in construction project management or any area within that from the trades other areas please subscribe to my channel and click notifications so you&#39;ll see as new videos come up in this series so as i mentioned today we&#39;re going to be diving into a site plan now this particular site plan is one that i actually used in my book called understanding construction drawings for housing and small buildings this particular model and this is available on amazon this particular model of house is a corner lot house so in video number one or lesson number one in this series and you can check my playlists if you want to go back and look at the previous videos or click notifications for upcoming videos the previous video we looked at the doncaster drawing which was actually a model house that was just down the street from this now a site plan is taken from a legal survey and it shows where the building is going to go on the particular property so it positions it or cites it on the particular property so it should show where the basically the property boundaries are it should show setback amounts setback is how far is the building set back from the property line and it should provide information about finished grading and finish grading is designed so that water will run away from the buildings and it will be directed towards some sort of drainage system it may be directed towards swales which are indentures in the ground that are directing the water away from the building which will either eventually bring it to a tributary a river or it may bring it into a storm sewer on the street or somewhere else that it&#39;s been located to gather that water and redirect it away from the area if they don&#39;t do that then what typically would happen is you&#39;d have un unpredictable accumulations of water that would form and perhaps flood out neighborhoods that previously were fine before you started building this subdivision of multiple houses so we always want to be cognizant of that and each city and town will have particular particular zoning requirements that revolve around ensuring that the grading is going to be done properly certain code requirements that ensures that certain safety minimum requirements are being met all right so let&#39;s take a look at this i&#39;m just going to zoom out a little bit i&#39;ll zoom in again in a few seconds but to zoom out you&#39;ll typically have like a site plan now it could be on you know it depends on what you&#39;re doing if you&#39;re doing a condominium development it&#39;s going to be on much bigger sheets of paper a typical size like for a house might be 11 by 17 that&#39;s only because it&#39;s easier easy to reproduce if you&#39;re printing it to be honest i prefer the digital my eyesight&#39;s not as good as it used to be and i can zoom in and zoom out uh very very quickly but it is nice to have big drawing sets so you get a good sense of what&#39;s going on i like to have both to be honest as you can see i&#39;ve got some drawings behind me but i also have the digital copies for those drawings so that i can review them and as i&#39;m a professor of construction management i&#39;ve built you know and been involved in hundreds of projects over my career and still in a consulting capacity working in that area i like the advantage of both and of course with 3d models i like that even better when you have a 3d model of the terrain you have basically an orthographic view which is what this is it&#39;s a flat straight on orthographic view most of our actual issued for construction drawings ifc issued for construction drawings are going to be in orthographic form flat straight on views because we can put information on it and we can zoom in and zoom out we can put measurements on it we can put what we call elevations on it and that makes it very easy then for us to lay things out from that but models are very good for visualization purposes as you&#39;ll see as we go further into the series visualization plays a big role in being able to be excellent at constructing buildings and looking at a drawing and in your mind visualizing what&#39;s going on so maybe that&#39;s what we should start to do let&#39;s visualize what&#39;s going on in this site plan here so it&#39;s as we zoom in here well before i actually zoom in so i&#39;ve just zoomed in you can kind of see this is a corner house because you&#39;ve got a street here and you&#39;ve got a street there right uh you know if i zoom out a little bit again you should see that we&#39;ve got a compass direction showing north and of course if we have a north direction we could easily then figure out where is you know west and where is east right so we can get that and where is south and so of course that is our north direction they&#39;ll only ever give you north so if you&#39;re directionally uh challenged as it&#39;s easy for some people to have that uh where they have a little bit of directional challenges my daughter sometimes has trouble figuring out left and right hands which always does this for left uh never eat shredded wheat going clockwise or this spells we when you know the north so just different ways that you can remember that that can be helpful for you under those purposes all right and the other thing that i wanted to show you next is we&#39;ve got this overall outline here always look at the legend so what does the legend tell us well the legend and i&#39;ll zoom in on this so you can see it better the legend gives us a lot of information it gives us a lot of symbols that will be used on the drawing so these are important they tell us what the symbols are and they may also give us abbreviations in my experience you can&#39;t count on these being the same for all your projects now i am i do know you know with this particular designer cassadine company this is pretty much the symbols they&#39;ll use standard so they&#39;ve got everything they&#39;re you know they&#39;re a very big uh architectural uh company and they do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of homes and so they&#39;ve standardized their processes but that doesn&#39;t mean that a different designer doesn&#39;t have slightly different you know for the most part they&#39;re similar but my experience always look at the legend that&#39;s provided with the designer and the nice thing is if you&#39;re working on the subdivision you might be working on this subdivision building hundreds of homes over the next five ten years you&#39;ll get used to this standard but then if you go on a different subdivision and it&#39;s a different designer you&#39;ve gotta get used to their ways of doing things just the way it is but you&#39;ve got abbreviations like finished floor elevation top of basement wall basement floor elevation these are very important because they will tell you for example if you&#39;re talking about underside of footing at the garage underside of footing at the rear of the house just underside of the footing at normal normal elevation points that&#39;s how far you have to excavate in relation to a benchmark and a benchmark is a standard elevation that is provided based on mean sea level coordinates and it&#39;s used because when we talk about drainage systems storm water drainage systems drains from the house etc they have to have a fall to them so there has to be basically a gravity fall to them and everything has to be coordinated but you also need that so that you can reference and you can design out a subdivision with the grading to ensure the water is directed where you need it to go so understanding elevations and visualizing elevations is very important in fact just the last few days i&#39;ve been getting a lot of landscaping work done on my house and you know i was looking at the drawings and because i had this excellent designer that did the the landscape drawings but visually i knew that uh where it said one step i knew there was going to be a requirement for two steps and so when the landscape contractor was there no it should be okay and i go no i don&#39;t think so because i can look at it and i can visualize it and then so of course they took out their uh instruments and their total station and they were checking it and there&#39;s oh you know what you&#39;re right it would be much better we&#39;ve got to put a second step because you want the water to fall away from the building you don&#39;t want to go to all that trouble and have it not work well you have no choice as a builder because the regulatory authorities are going to make sure that you have that fall away from the building so all of these symbols like elevations are important for those reasons and that&#39;s why you also will see things like it&#39;ll say proposed elevation and existing elevation in lesson three i plan to use a commercial drawing that we&#39;ll look at so the upcoming lesson that i&#39;ll post in another week or so will have a existing elevation and proposed elevations this only has the proposed elevations these particular drawings here which is the finished grade elevations of when you complete the project all right but if it showed something like a number in brackets that would be telling you oh wait a minute that has an existing elevation i don&#39;t think there&#39;s any on this drawing but you never know we might come across it as we go through it together all right so we&#39;ll go through these different elements where they are on the drawings or if they occur on the drawings uh you&#39;ll also notice it says scale nts not to scale i&#39;ll spend another session on that coming up on scaling of drawings and what you have to know and what you have to be careful of usually the date is important you want to make sure you&#39;re working with the most current date i&#39;ve sort of whited that out because dates always change etc and so these are important elements and you can sort of see usually there&#39;s a list of uh drawings that are been listed for these requirements usually there&#39;ll be dates and you&#39;ll just want to have some way this gets into more project management and site management some way of organizing the drawing so you have a hierarchy that you know you&#39;re working with the most current set of drawing because you don&#39;t want to be doing something if something&#39;s changed you don&#39;t be doing something off the old drawings like i just said with my landscape contractor well if we discuss that we&#39;re going to put a second step and it gets redesigned and then somehow the communication to the site leader gets misplaced then they&#39;re going to start laying it out and excavating for one step instead of two steps and then that&#39;s going to cause a lot of problems down the road so currency of drawings is important that&#39;s where a lot of the productivity software is like field wire blue beam pro core plan grid these types of tools are very helpful because they can have a way of managing those documents and you know when you&#39;re looking at the most current one and it&#39;s live and dynamic static systems are like when you print something and it&#39;s like something changed and it wasn&#39;t printed that&#39;s a big problem so in construction we have to be mindful of that that we have systems in place all right getting back to our drawings here we have this plot plan it&#39;s on a corner lot so usually what i like to do is visualize what am i looking at here because you might be looking at that and saying i don&#39;t know what he&#39;s talking about here i don&#39;t exactly get uh what he&#39;s referring to right and so what i usually like to do is i usually like to highlight where the actual property is and where the actual house is so maybe you want to just freeze this for a minute or even just take a look at it before i talk about it and see if you can see the outline of the house where the garage is and where the property lines are that&#39;s always helpful for you to try to do this before i show you because then that gets you thinking on those things so i&#39;ll let you pause that and take a good look at that if you will uh it&#39;s always good when you figure these things out just remember that and so the property line is basically coming along here it&#39;s coming down it&#39;s whoops it&#39;s coming down this line here all right it&#39;s going to come down straight down this line all the way on the west side right it&#39;s going to come across the back and then it&#39;s just going to go up that straight line there so that&#39;s going to be basically the oops i went a little bit off there it&#39;s going to come straight down that line over here right so that&#39;s the property line maybe i can get a little bit different color for the um house so let&#39;s try the house now so this here is the edge of the house it&#39;s coming around it&#39;s coming here it&#39;s coming down here and this right here is the porch so there&#39;s like this nice porch on this house that comes down you can sort of see the steps there and it&#39;s coming down and around it&#39;s going down and it&#39;s going to go straight across here we got that there and it&#39;s just going to go straight up um that line that&#39;s right beside the east property line right so you can sort of see how that encircles the building a little bit awkward with my mouse here but you can see where the house outline is and that&#39;s important to distinguish where is the house where is the property lines you&#39;ve got to get that stuff down right off the bat all right so here now you would have the full construction drawings but i can intuitively look at this and understand that this it says ufg for one so there&#39;s a clue underside of footing gar which would mean underside of footing garage right so i can get that that means that the garage and i&#39;ll zoom in maybe a little bit more for you the garage is following this outline i&#39;ll use a different color here it&#39;s a little bit bright maybe but it&#39;ll do the purpose so the garage is doing this outline here all right and so you know i can overlap it here i guess you could say because that&#39;ll be where the garage door is at the front all right so the garage is contained in this area part of the building right i&#39;m not saying it&#39;s not part it&#39;s it&#39;s connected it&#39;s inside um but uh it&#39;s good to know that because you can see here you&#39;ve got a spot elevation 112.21 you see a little x that&#39;s a spot elevation see a little x over here right and it says 111.96 so what that means is and we&#39;re in metric on this so this is looking at meters being canada it&#39;s meters yours might be you know it might be a hundred and ten point five feet and it might say a hundred and nine point five feet over here if it was in imperial same idea doesn&#39;t change that way so you&#39;ve got one 112.21 111.96 series of measurements doesn&#39;t matter it&#39;s just what you&#39;re using for your elevations generally speaking though when you&#39;re talking about site plans and surveys they&#39;re done in decimals as opposed to construction drawings which in metric they are done in obviously millimeters in imperial they&#39;re done in feet inches fractions of an inch right so in canada even though our building code is in metric uh usually residential drawings i would say uh the majority of them are done in imperial and that&#39;s because we ship most of our goods like plywood uh you know drywall and stuff to the us so we probably ship 10 times what we manufacture to the u.s so we don&#39;t really just change them up because metric sheets are slightly different than imperial sheets so it doesn&#39;t really matter in this case 112.21 that&#39;s the elevation here and 111.96 so that tells me that there&#39;s a difference of 25 which really it&#39;s talking about a difference of 250 or 0.25 meters right so really it&#39;s talking about a difference of two five there&#39;s about 25 millimeters in an inch 10 inches so there&#39;s a fall from basically the garage to the sidewalk of about 10 inches and that&#39;s 10 inches over this distance from here to here right so that&#39;s okay that&#39;s fine because we want to have the water run away from the house and that&#39;s why it&#39;s saying there&#39;s a 4.34 percent uh slope so what that would mean is that way i always look at it when it&#39;s given as a percentage very easy to visualize that&#39;s the first thing you want to do you want to be able to visualize something like that so what you can think about from uh that perspective is if you have a hundred inches right it&#39;s four point four point three four inches to nothing over a hundred inches that&#39;s the way to think about it so you know you&#39;re thinking about uh eight foot four inches 100 inches right 96 plus four well i got 4.34 inches down to nothing so over that length of 100 inches one side&#39;s 4.34 the other side is nothing that gives you the slope and now you understand what the ratio is and what the slope is because a lot of people i&#39;ve found in construction when you say a two percent slope or you say three percent slope you&#39;re like yeah an inch and a half i get it no it&#39;s not an inch and a half not if it&#39;s 20 feet long or what have you it is two percent two inches on a hundred inches so if you got two in 200 inches overall it better be 4 inches because you&#39;re going 2 inches and 2 inches so you have to think about it in those terms because it can make a big difference ok so we have that understanding of slope and we understand that these are spot elevations uh they&#39;re based on a benchmark based on mean sea level which it would be at basically zero so mean sea level might be 500 miles away right or more depending where you&#39;re located might be just down the street if you&#39;re if you&#39;re next to the ocean but these are how those are calculated and so partly because the storm sewers and the sanitary sewers a sanitary sewer is what takes the waste from the toilet storm sewers might be taking water from downspouts it might be taking clean water from weeping tile that is going around the house etc if it&#39;s you know if you have to have a waterproofing done because there&#39;s hydrostatic pressure on the foundation water pressure high water table it may be taking water away from around the foundation um so that&#39;s clean water this goes straight into the rivers and lakes this goes to a treatment facility where it&#39;s treated before it gets uh put back into this ecosystem you&#39;ll notice here this sort of track here well that&#39;s a sidewalk so that&#39;s a sidewalk and that&#39;s that&#39;s what that&#39;s referring to this would be a little bit of a boulevard here probably some grass this here is a hydro transformer right so you got a hydro transformer over uh here so where is the symbol for that just so that we can see it there it is transformer right so that means your electricity is below ground there&#39;s not hydro poles and that&#39;s a transformer this little cross pattern here is a street light so that&#39;s referring to that that&#39;s a street light sometimes the symbols don&#39;t 100 match what they show but that&#39;s what that is in this case this here is a catch basin you know the sewer grate that you think about we call it a catch basin catches all the water that&#39;s flowing down the street and water that&#39;s flowing down the driveway would also go back to there and then it&#39;s redirected remember that these systems and drainage for a subdivision is designed on hundred-year worst storms with a factor of safety built in so that it should be able to have the capacity not very frequently of flooding things right we have to be careful how we design for 100-year storms with climate change and things like that i think new york city&#39;s had three hundred year storms in like 10 years so that changes the calculations right all right uh setbacks so this is 10.05 meters set back from the rear property line or you could say from the south property line right so this is the property line on the south side uh we have a setback over uh here of 3.87 meters so you have to look very carefully um from where it&#39;s going to so you see the tick mark here and there&#39;s another tick mark there so it&#39;s 3.87 meters from the property line here to this edge right so you have to be very careful where the slashes are and where it&#39;s going from and where it&#39;s going to from that perspective so that you can accurately see what the measurements are and then you see this it&#39;s 13.58 meters from the back of the house right on the south side to the most extreme northerly part of the house it&#39;s not stopping here it&#39;s not stopping there it&#39;s going straight through to here right so that you got to follow that you got to be very careful about where it&#39;s going to and from right and that&#39;s also where if you had you know if you wanted to scale it to confirm it you could do checks um that can be helpful if you think that you&#39;ve got something messed up or you&#39;re not 100 sure that can always be helpful for that i&#39;ll talk about scaling in another example video okay so we&#39;ve got those setbacks we can see here very carefully you see those two little slashes maybe i&#39;ll zoom in a little bit more for you so you can see a little bit better so you see those two little slashes there well that&#39;s 0.35 meters so that&#39;s 350 millimeters right when you&#39;re showing something in meters and you want to convert to millimeters you have to move it three places one for decimeters one for centimeters and one for millimeters so that&#39;s the same as saying 350 millimeters right so you&#39;re looking at about 14 inches or so there and that is going from the property line here to the house on this side it&#39;s 1.25 when they can fit the measurement between they will fit the measurement between when they can&#39;t fit it they&#39;ll put it to the side so that&#39;s important to note as well and you can see there&#39;s a spot elevation there 112.27 there&#39;s a high point it says 112.12 which is lower than this but this is the high point for the swale see these arrows those are swales those are little curves you don&#39;t want the water to go against the house you want to go from the side of the house down to the middle so from each house it slopes down right and then it&#39;s redirected some of it is redirected from the high point in this direction you see the arrow because that&#39;s going to take it out this way and eventually out to the sewer or catch basin and then it&#39;s also going to take it out this way down through the south side and then you see a swale along the back of the lot see there&#39;s another house over here that you don&#39;t see the water is also sloping back towards there and it&#39;s going to redirect this way so that some will go out to the street and it&#39;s going to redirect this way and then you can see another redirection taking that that area so there must be a slope outward that way in this particular case so you follow the swales and you get a good sense of how the water is to flow and then you get the elevations and then when it&#39;s being laid out and graded then basically they are checking to make sure that they&#39;re filling it in so that they&#39;re making sure that those slopes are going to take place so that&#39;s what&#39;s going on there we have here it says uh the finished floor 112.72 top of basement wall 112.48 right we&#39;ve got underside of footing is 110.02 and b f what was bf basement floor elevation yeah this one because i usually don&#39;t pay too much attention to that one it&#39;s really going to be based on where you&#39;re uh basically where your top of footing is so underside of footing is one ten point zero uh two and so then from there you know what if i know the underside of my footing is 110.02 and i know my finished floor is 112.72 i can with a section detail i can start adding stuff up and i&#39;ll show you that in another video as well where you basically take the thickness of the footing you take what the finished floor is supposed to be that&#39;s going to give you the height of the wall you&#39;re going to have a sill plate you&#39;re going to have a floor joist you&#39;re going to have a subfloor and that would be your finished floor height when it says finished floor it means to the subfloor doesn&#39;t mean to the top of the ceramic tile or to hardwood flooring everything is to where you frame your structure to uh typically there&#39;s always these exceptions but typically all right and we have here a sunken landing so that means when you there there&#39;s an opportunity here that you could have a door it&#39;s not showing that but if you see the actual drawings for the whittington there&#39;s an opportunity to have a door through from the garage and usually you want to have a sunken landing usually one riser because that will you know sunken landings usually one riser or two risers in the house and then you&#39;ve got one riser down to the garage floor this is showing you basically you&#39;ve got that sunken landing and you&#39;ve got that option for a doorway of course they charge you extra if that&#39;s the case but that&#39;s where that information is coming from and so and that if you look at this this is what 0.53 and this is 0.36 so it&#39;s a little bit less than 200 millimeters probably at close to 7 inches or so then that would be a typical step there so that&#39;s what that is over here you can see four risers so that means you&#39;re going to have four steps down and it says walk out deck it doesn&#39;t show the deck in this particular drawing but there would be a walk out deck and then you would have four risers down four risers that&#39;s the vertical component of a stairs the treads are the horizontal component so if you have four risers you got three treads and actually this is four risers so that would be typically one riser from the house to the deck and then three risers down to the ground these things sometimes they&#39;re like i said even with my own landscaping drawings sometimes they&#39;re off by you know one riser but it gives you a really should be very close to that if everything&#39;s been done well and properly then there&#39;s other things that are symbols that you have to get used to you know like what is this and what is this well this is showing a fence right and this is showing a gate i guess in the subdivision i think in this particular case um they would typically put in a fence and a in here we have and that&#39;s the direction that the gate would open that would be what we call a right-hand gate um i&#39;ll talk about that in another uh episode on floor plans but this is what is that well i don&#39;t know let&#39;s take a look so if i go down and i take a look the only thing that&#39;s got this here is what they call a super mailbox and that&#39;s what that is referring to being a corner house there&#39;s a community mailbox and usually it&#39;s bigger than that it&#39;s usually a little bit longer than that so i&#39;m not quite sure why they showed it just square like that but that means that there&#39;s a bunch of boxes here and that means the neighbors come up and they get their mail from here if you live there you might not think it&#39;s so super everybody coming up uh on your part of the the lawn and that sort of stuff uh to get it because it&#39;s not really your part uh but um that&#39;s where that would be located for that reason all right uh and this here is a sidewalk that goes around to the front of the porch and these are posts that will support the roof over the porch that is coming into play we can see the side yard setbacks so this would be from the west side of the property line and so this is 3.65 meters to here this is 2.15 to the edge of the step that&#39;s coming down so you can see it&#39;s giving you the different you&#39;ve got setbacks from this side from this side from the front from the back you&#39;ve got the overall length of the building at its longest point from outside to outside you&#39;ve got the width of the building with at its widest point so that&#39;s from here so look where the extension line is this is an extension line this is a dimension line and look where it goes to it goes to over here right so we&#39;re going from there to there across here 11.2 meters it&#39;s not going to the edge here right this little point is telling you four risers down right you got one two three risers and like i said the fourth riser is from the floor to the porch and then you&#39;re going down three risers from the porch that&#39;s where you&#39;re looking at it that&#39;s how you need to think about it all this stuff ties in uh together right it&#39;s very important you don&#39;t want to end up with the first floor that is lower than the ground outside i&#39;m not saying that never happens but it&#39;s definitely not ideal it&#39;s not what you want to have happen there&#39;s usually some sort of real unusual circumstance going on with the grading uh in that particular example but you know 99.9 of the time you want to make sure that the first floor is higher than where the grade is it doesn&#39;t have to be hugely higher but as long as it&#39;s higher you know there&#39;s barrier-free access that comes into design making sure that the elderly can easily access things less risers like if it&#39;s a bungalow in those cases is more fundamentally important but still we want to be up a little bit we can have a ramp a you know low slope ramp for barrier-free access all right so i think that&#39;s pretty much what i wanted to get across uh in this particular uh video we will have upcoming ones more on this we will revisit this because it does take a little bit of practice to get used to looking at these drawings and understanding what is going on but you know we went from something that&#39;s just a bunch of lines to getting a good understanding of you know there&#39;s two streets here it&#39;s a corner lot this will be the actual curb that goes around there&#39;s a sidewalk probably a good five foot uh wide sidewalk or six foot wide sidewalk here&#39;s a fairly narrow sidewalk from going around the house probably like 30 inches or so that&#39;s going around to the front uh door here&#39;s the garage these are spot elevations this is a high point over here this is a swale that&#39;s going in each direction if you want to visualize swales and some of the other things a little bit better go back and look at my lesson one it should pop up i&#39;m going to put a reference to it on the pop-up coming up shortly and look at my playlist and please subscribe as we go through this and you learn more about reading construction drawings from housing and small buildings and the book has literally hundreds and hundreds of questions and that&#39;s how you practice and you see how you&#39;re doing you look at the answers and that sort of thing so i hope this has been helpful for you i&#39;m tom stevenson wishing you a wonderful day and we&#39;ll see you next time and don&#39;t forget to leave a comment and to subscribe bye for now

Transcript for:Understanding Construction Drawings

Transcript for:
Understanding Construction Drawings