hi i'm tom stevenson and welcome to understanding construction drawings in this video series we're going to be helping you to learn to read review and understand construction drawings today's lesson is lesson four in this series if you're interested in really getting to know how to read construction drawings i suggest you click the subscribe button click notifications and check on the playlist the playlist will be growing the understanding construction drawings playlist will be growing week by week as we add more videos to it i'm a professor of construction management and i have quite a number of videos on my youtube channel so you may be interested in some of the other playlists and courses that are loaded up on youtube as we build this community all right so let's get started this is lesson four as i mentioned and we're going to be looking at elevation drawings in this particular video and we've been reviewing different site plans we looked at three different site plans in the first three lessons and today we're going to be looking at the elevations and the elevations are the vertical views of the building i'll start off i'll show you the site plan that we started out with and this is then the drawings for that so we're going to build on this i'm going to try to get you sort of understanding the elements of it and then in future videos we'll actually go through the whole sort of sets of drawings for different houses and different buildings as we move along in this series so today we're really just trying to interpret basic information that we find on an elevation drawing and floor plans but we're not going to get into the floor plans too much today i will just be relating to it from the sense that you've got a site plan and in a future video lecture we'll jump into the floor plans so we'll be looking at the exterior elevations we'll compare the drawing to what was actually built this particular house is a house that i used when i wrote my book understanding construction drawings for housing and small buildings if you want to learn much more about how to read drawings you can download the book from amazon or you can have it delivered from uh you know any major book seller and it's got over 1500 questions that really sort of helps you build on that series but for today and for the other videos you don't really have to have the book to get that good introduction to it okay so let's get started this is the site plan that we looked at so if you're if you're kind of confused with this and it looks like a lot of stuff go back and look at lesson one and i go through this in detail so that you really have a good understanding and orientation to it and i've got a bunch of actual photos of the site and to really give you a good understanding of what's going on but some things that you probably want to know for today is that this particular house the garage is located over here this is the north so this is pointing north this is south that's west that's east and uh basically the house in this particular case is located on this sort of pie shaped lot which has a pretty big slope to it the drawings that we're looking at are a little bit different they're the standard drawings for what we call the doncaster model so on this particular site it had a number of different models tribute was the actual builder for it cassidy and company did the drawings and with a big subdivision you usually have one set of drawings like that'll be a model and they might have different front elevations to it like might have an a elevation a b elevation a c elevation for the front but inside everything is the same so in future drawings that we look at we'll look at some that have multiple front elevations and we'll look at how those combine to give a different look to the street in this particular case we're just going to keep it simple and we're going to look at the front elevation of this one house which followed this sort of view here so yes so elevation drawings they show the height and the width of a single face of the building they're orthographic drawings orthographic drawings are what we use in construction flat straight on views we also use 3d models you know in more advanced applications or even in simpler applications to be honest uh to enhance and help with visualization i'll show you some examples of that uh later in this series so these are orthographic drawings straight on views what that that's a good thing because you can put a lot of dimensions around it and information around it it's not a great thing in the sense you don't see depth without looking at a bunch of different views to really fully understand what's going on and so we tend to call them building elevations or just the elevations and just think of them as flat straight views front view rear view left view right view or north elevation so in a case like this this would be the north elevation the front of the house this would be the south elevation this would be the west and this would be the east based on this compass direction usually on subdivision production drawings on the drawings themselves they don't put the orientation because on one block this draw this particular model might be facing north and on another street it might be facing south so they usually leave that off on a custom home it'll say north elevation west elevation east elevation etc so you know what you're looking at now elevations aren't always just for the front of the building they could be for the interior if you get a new kitchen most kitchen designers have a 3d software that you can look at a 3d model of your kitchen you can look at it from different views and they will also have orthographic views where they have the dimensions of the cabinets and everything like that sort of laid out to help them in production in constructing the cabinets and architects will do that as well to give a better view for clients as to what this is going to look like and also to the contractors who may be subcontracting to the millwork manufacturers or the cabinet makers so this is the front elevation of the doncaster house all right and so on the front elevation here we can see a lot of bits of information now these drawings are in metric so if you're imperial oriented for the purposes of this video because i'll be using some imperial drawings as well coming up but i thought i'd keep with this model because it's the best one i can explain with photo images and that to help you visualize what's going on so what we have here is metric dimensions so these are millimeters yours would say if you're an imperial it might say instead of two foot uh 2995 millimeters it might say something like nine foot six inches or something like that nine foot dash six inches so everything else is the same your your dimensions are given between two extension lines so these are called extension lines these vertical lines here and the horizontal one here is the dimension so that's telling you where it's going from and where it's going to this 150 here is talking about the projection of the roof how far is the roof going to stick out from the finished brick and we know this is brick it tells us it's brick okay so then these are vertical dimensions here and so these are the vertical dimensions this is going from the top of the basement slab this is to the finished ground floor and finish ground floor just means to the subfloor it doesn't mean to the hardwood or to the tile or to the carpet it means to the subfloor and then this is the distance from one finished floor to the next finish floor and then this is the distance from the finished second floor to the top of the wood wall plate which is forming the walls we have a bottom plate we have a top plate we have studs that form the actual wall and so the contractor or builder is going to try to build this very very closely to what this resembles in the image and so this is the actual finished house and you can sort of uh you know you can go back and forth and review this if you want on youtube easily uh but you can kind of get a good sense there's a few things that aren't exactly there's an old saying that the map is not the territory right so there's always these little differences like for example they even go to the trouble of saying there's a detail on this to show this space here that the brick goes up but if you look at the actual house they didn't put it in so there's a few small things but generally it's a very good rendition of what's happening on this particular house and how it was actually being constructed in relation to the drawings and there's a whole bunch of information here we'll get into when we actually look at the drawings in future videos make sure that you look at the construction notes there's usually a legend that will tell you what these abbreviations mean like f g sometimes they don't tell you like d o in this case it means ditto same as so you notice here on this window it says 760 by 1220 they give the width first and then the height and that would be the outside dimension of the window 760 by 1220 760 wide by 12 20 high millimeters ditto means it's the same as this it's the same as this is same as this so they don't have to keep writing the same dimensions over and over and over again now you also notice this little dashed line and in previous videos i've said like a dashed line means it's behind something like you notice the dashed line here means it's below grade it's in the ground this is the foundation right well this dashed line it's not that it's behind something it's telling you that this window is a casement window and it's hinged on this side and it opens this window is a casement window and it's hinged on the opposite side so this would be basically on a right hand side uh on sorry on this particular window would be on on the left hand side this window will be on the right hand side they call it a right hand and a left hand how it's swinging and we'll talk about that in another video as well when we talk about doors this one here would be on the left hand as well these ones here they're not opening they're fg fixed glass right so they are are fixed they don't open this is the size of this window off to the left they couldn't fit it in there so they put it off to the left that's common 610 by 760. so that's 610 millimeters wide by 760 and this will be the same now this leader line so that's a leader line that's pointing to this whole thing which is a dormer right says provide black building paper behind fixed glass what are they talking about why would you put black building paper behind fixed glass well this for lack of a better word it's not a functioning dormer i tend to call it to my students a dummy dormer it it's not a real dormer usually you put dormers in to add space to what you're trying to um you know like it on that floor if it's a story and a half you put a dormer and it's adding space but this particular house has roof trusses and they're not designed to add extra space so this is really to give more to the aesthetic look of the building to make it look like it's three floors even though it's not so that happens uh quite a bit in you know in um at least where i am it may not in your area or that sort of thing but it tends to happen fairly fairly often and it may even be part of architectural control requirements the municipality wants to give the neighborhood a little bit grandiose uh look to it uh but definitely it it makes it more substantial i don't think they put black behind it i think they actually there's windows that actually have the black behind it because you you don't want to be looking from down here and just see roof trusses so it emulates more like it's a room up there maybe with darkened curtains or something like that but it's not a real dormer adding space to the building but it does give that sense so that's part of it when you're looking at this stuff you're trying to visualize it and so you see this you got to be visualizing oh okay i get what they're doing they're putting that it's for aesthetic reasons okay i get it that's what we've got to do so it's good to understand otherwise you think oh there's going to be space up there and there's not here it's giving you the slope for the roof and so they will generally whether it's metric or imperial they'll generally give it to 12 because you know what they know that the framers they're going to lay it out with imperial because the sheets of plywood are imperial and in canada we lay out the studs imperial 16 inches on center so like i said if you're in the u.s and you're using imperial a lot of the stuff we still do the same though so don't be too drawn in by this and in future videos i'll i'll use uh drawings that have imperial measurement uh in it as well so we have uh the slopes here and you can see over here this is a very steep slope over this boxed window here 1220 right so that's a pretty steep slope over here we got a 10.5 by 12. and some people wonder why didn't they just make it a 12 by 12 in our area in the gta of toronto uh the framers are pretty much unionized and so they have contracts if you make it 12 12 they get a little bit more extra money because it's a steeper slope to work on so they the designer tries to get it as close to 12 12 without going over it in fact the you know they probably end up lean and the trusses are very close to 11.912 so we see a lot of other bits of information here again there's another roof slope so it's always ratioed to 12. very frequently though if it's a cut roof that's being cut on site instead of being put together with dormers they'll go with like 7 12 8 12 6 12 5 12 very sort of standard ratios to 12. and all that means is for every 12 inches you go along you're going up five or you're going up 7.9 or you're going up 10.5 or you're going up 11.9 and that gives you the slope it doesn't really matter if it's 12 inches or 12 centimeters it's the same slope that it will give you so it's a ratio just think of it that way but they use 12 because that fits nice with a framing square okay so you can also get a lot of information on the finishes like self-sealing asphalt finishes the size of the garage doors right so and that's the o you'll see abbreviations rwl that's for the rainwater leader or downspout if you will sometimes it might say ds for downspoke tells you a front elevation like i said if this was a custom how a custom home based on the actual site plan back here then this would be the north elevation because this is what we're looking at we're looking at this front elevation this is that porch that you see and this is the garage looking at it so that's that porch and that's the garage and then this is this box window that's sticking out over here all right so that's some of the things this this box window is cantilevered so actually even though it's cantilever they still show it um boxed out a little bit very often they won't because it doesn't have a foundation but in this case they did all right here you can see the depth underside of footing so we're in a cold climate and with our building code and where we are with a heated basement we have a four foot frost line so the 12 20 is metric for four foot so we have to be minimum four foot below grade so this being a garage it doesn't have a room underneath it so the garage slab is going to sit on the grate so instead of going right down the full amount in this area here they've stepped the footings down to where there's a basement so this the rest of it has a basement in it so the rest of this house has a basement so going back to the site plan this area doesn't have a basement the rest of the house does have a basement and that's why this part of the house the footings just need to be down minimum four feet they can be more and you know what in a lot of cases the builder if they're doing track building that they've got a whole bunch of houses going in in a row they might find that it's a lot easier just to excavate it straight down the whole way even though it shows this because it says minimum it doesn't mean they can't go more from that perspective all right so we also see things like i said the brickwork uh you see here so the brick is basically a face brick that means it's a brick veneer it is not a solid masonry wall it that means that it's going to have wood framing or something behind it that supports the house when we look at this drawings we'll see it's a wood frame house with a brick veneer around it again that's very geographical there's a lot of parts in canada and the us where brick isn't that popular they use composite materials or mixtures of different materials in the greater toronto area brick is very popular and so brick stone combinations very very popular so it just depends your area that sort of thing and the availability and cost here we've got a wood freeze board and this is decorative this looks nice going around the top they don't tend to bring it all the way around if you're not going to see it but if you're going to see it from the street or from the back they would probably put that all the way around so you'll see on the side elevations where they they stop it in some spots because it's just a decorative add-on it's telling you about the pre-finished alum aluminum rainwater leader or downspout the ease trough or gutter fascia board and vented soffit we'll talk about the vented soffit in another uh session but the vented soffit basically means this overhang there's going to be ventilation in the saw there's going to be little slits in the aluminum soffit so that air can flow from outside up into the attic and then out and so what that does is it picks up excess moisture that might be accumulating in the lat in the attic and dries it out and ensures that you don't have a moisture buildup and mold growing in your attic we have uh ventilation that we have to provide in the roof and in canada we provide one to three hundred so one square foot of ceiling area uh requires um three so basically we've got one square foot for every 300 square foot of ceiling area so if we have a thousand square feet we're going to need three and a third square feet of ventilation in the roof adding from both the soffit and roof ventilation and we'll talk about that more too it so you get a sense here you also see these little hexagons and these give you references so you could reference the construction notes and look at well what's this saying about step footings and there'll be a whole bunch of information on step footings and as we get into the drawings further we'll we'll do those types of things so that's the front elevation you get a good sense and you know when you look at this on the front you don't this looks like it's kind of even although you can see that's a little bit higher there but you know that it sticks out but you really don't know is it just stick out a little bit or does it stick out a lot and so that's why you have to be able to look and review a number of the elevations so watch this when we look at the next one so this is essentially your in this case right side elevation usually when they give sides front right left rear it's when you face the building all right so this is the right side elevation so that's basically the elevation between these two houses here right and so that's why that freeze board it stops here why spend the extra money on running it between the two houses when nobody's going to see it really so you know builders are conscious of those kind of things also by the way you look at this front elevation look at the brick you see these these are what we call a um rollout course sorry a um header course stacked header they're stacked on top of each other and these would actually have a projection so you notice here it says break brick header stack bond with 10 projection so that means they stick out about just under a half an inch from the rest of the brick so if you're actually physically there it kind of looks nice it gives it a nice look to it and they're stacked up now of course these have to be tied into the brickwork so there's basically metal ties in the joints that will tie these headers stacked headers to the face brick usually about every um four or five uh stacked headers they'll have a brick tie that ties them together and uh makes it gives it a little bit more aesthetic look you can't really it's kind of bled in over here but if you have the actual if you're actually there it does look very nice so this is basically that other elevation and again we can see things like the roof overhang how much it's projecting out from here we can see there's looks like some sort of extension on the roof in the rear this is the side of our dormers and so you see how this slope is pretty much matching that slope so that just means you they didn't bother to put it there because it's the same slope you also see this is how far that roof sticks out so it's not sticking out very far from that perspective it doesn't tell us how far in this view but when we get into the floor plans it will tell you how far this protrudes outward this however protrudes a lot more out so does this so that's telling me that this is quite deep back so this is going back a fair bit but i really don't know that it's that much until i look at the other side elevation i got an idea with this side elevation because this here is the cover over the porch right and then i'm seeing that wall and then i realized that there is actually a window there as well in this little spot over here because you're standing over here looking that way if you want to think about it here so that's i couldn't get the whole house because i couldn't fit between the two houses but this is what you'd be looking at coming across there so you can see that that part sticks out you can see the porch under construction there and then there's the other side so now we got basically this upgraded left side elevation one of the reasons this one is upgraded is because if you recall on the site plan and we'll just go back a few there was this storm water easement and it's actually up ends up being a pathway out to this nice tributary where they have a nice little sort of trail going back there so that's what they call architectural control the municipality wants areas that are exposed to the public to look nice so the builder has to do some enhancements to the look which they call architectural control and so they definitely did in this case so this is the upgraded left side they can extend this out further because they're not right next to another house uh they've got those opportunities because there's all kinds of building code requirements we call limiting distance with how many openings you can have when you're too close or very close to another property in this case uh we have a fair bit of we have lots of space between the next property um so we're not very limited in that respect so we've got lots of openings going on and it's really a focal point with this box window here it looks very very nice when it's all said and done on the other side we can see the dormer up here now we start to see again there's a roof on something going on in the back here we can see all of our heights which is our elevation from the finished ground floor to the finished second floor so that's giving us valuable information that we'll put together later after we've done a review of floor plans and how you can even do calculations you know you can figure out well how long should my studs be based on this information and so this is the actual uh house looking at it straight on so you can see the box window and you can see the various windows here and with this sort of decorative detail of a panel that they put in it's purely decorative no other reason and then we can also see that that there's that massive slope that goes down there that's what these drawings don't have is the special cut for this particular property for that actual set of drawings they would show this cut because what they're doing here is they are trying to not have a big wall of concrete that looks ugly they're trying to make the brick stay fairly close to the grade without being too close building code would require that it can't be closer than six inches to the finished grade they're going to layer topsoil over here and then sod on top of that you can see the roof vents here they typically don't show roof fence on drawings but they do make note of them in the construction notes that you have to provide that one to 300 minimum ratio for ventilation in the roof and this is a vent pipe for your plumbing in the drain waste fight event system you have to vent basically sewer gas out through the roof and so that typically won't show on a drawing either but that's part of the plumbing code you can see your services your gas main and your electrical service here and that's where they will enter into the building in this particular case they're all underground so this is the rear elevation so remember that part of the roof that was sticking out that we were wondering what it is right looking at from both sides well there it is when you look at the rear this is why you have to look at all of the elevations this is why you have to look at all the floor plans and you have to try to put this together visually in your mind so that takes a bit of time and effort to do and a bit of skill it's also why when somebody throws a set of drawings in front of me i don't get it right away either it takes me a little bit of time to really visualize it you may be working on a construction site right now and you think your boss is a genius how they are able to go through it they probably spent quite a bit of time going through those drawings to really connect with it to visualize it and then they can start to flip and they want to flip because they want to remind themselves okay this is the elevation this is where this window is i'm going to check the floor plan that it's got to be corresponding or there's a mistake in the drawings right so we can see that we can we'll see more of this when we look at the second floor elevations which will tell us more about this particular gable dormer this is a gable roof where it's just flat and it just that's the simplest roof to construct the rest of the roof is what we would call a hip or cottage roof it slopes in on all sides so it slopes on all sides and there's what we call a hip right so these are hips but this one on the back it's a gable all right so some houses they're just gable roofs some houses are just hip roofs some houses are combinations there's all kinds of different things you can do here we said we have a stacked header and a header brick is when you've got the end of a brick here we've got soldiers over the top of the windows so we call those soldiers when the bricks stand up they are called brick soldier course with 10 millimeter projection as well so they carried on those header and the brick soldiers on the first floor around the building so you can see the soldiers there this is an exhaust fan this when we look at the power at the floor plans is what we call a powder room it's got a basin and it's got a water closet or toilet but it doesn't have a shower because it's on the first floor so we can see basically the various size of windows and we'll also look at why are these panels here why didn't they just carry this window down all the way and we'll get an idea later on while the kitchen's here the kitchen counter right so we we couldn't make the windows this height otherwise we might have for those reasons again it's face brick all around these are sliding windows on the on the basement here going this way this of course would be casement this one's opening this one's not these ones are not opening these ones are right so it's a good idea too if you have clients walk them through it they may get quite surprised what do you mean these windows aren't opening i thought they were all opening their windows no these are the only ones if you want them to open no problem but there's an extra cost and there would be an extra cost having a window uh hinged and this is saying which door is sliding so this door would slide that way that's what it's referring to with the door now with these sizes whatever you do you know if you're going from drawings make sure that whatever windows you've opened you know that they're actually that size and make sure that you frame the openings bigger than that size all right so you know if this is 610 i usually will add uh an inch all basically to the width and an inch to the height that gives me a half an inch all around the edge that's enough room to foam it and if your studs aren't exactly perfect and plumb we can shim the windows so they're perfect and plum wood warps and twists and it does all sorts of things so we need a little bit of flexibility so that we can make our windows and doors perfect and so don't ever trust that you know your manufacturers windows are going to be exactly that you look at what you ordered and what the outside of the frame of the windows actually is and then you make sure that your rough openings are a little bit bigger very important that'll save you days of anguish and cost of re doing and reworking the openings when you find out they're a little bit too small us means underside of soffit so this is what from the finished second floor to the underside of the soffit and the soffit is the horizontal part of the overhang right and the projection so i think you know you can sort of see this here in this particular case because our floor drops you'll notice the windows are a little bit bigger so they didn't adjust uh this particular drawing to for that particular lot the actual drawing for this house if it was the actual one would show the larger windows and would show the actual walkout uh deck here so this one is actually assuming that you're almost that great and maybe you might need a precast step to get you down to great but here we've got to because it steps down we've got to have a deck that has a number of steps so we can get down to grade if it was a little bit steeper slope we might have had a basement walkout that you could just come out and walk directly out or they could add a doorway you know in the basement if you didn't have this uh case here and maybe in another spot you might be able to have a doorway and re-change the design of the steps from the porch so there's all kinds of different things that are possible but usually in production they stick to certain options because it makes it easier it's like when you buy a car when you buy a new car you've got option a option b option c you don't have a lot of choices in between so it kind of depends on the production builder but definitely a production builder is not trying to be a custom home builder custom home you can get whatever you want it's your dream home right and so you should be putting together how these elevations look so when i look at the rear elevation i look at the left elevation in my mind i should be able to visualize this stuff and that takes a bit of time and that takes a bit of effort but over time that you will get better at that and especially you should be able to look at the site plan recognize that this slopes off look at the side elevation and the rear elevation and get a good sense of how the whole building goes together and that's really what i wanted to cover in this video on introducing elevations and as i said we'll be going through other elevations on other drawings and we'll be going through floor plans and detailed drawings in this series so if you enjoyed that please click subscribe to my channel uh leave a comment you got questions you need help on a different particular type of understanding of drawings let me know and if i have time i'll take a look into doing a video on that i'm always looking for ideas from the viewers it's helpful too when you leave comments or ideas that way and if you're interested as i mentioned before the understanding construction drawing book it's got a lot of questions that's really helps you when you practice reading the drawings it comes with drawings and you can go through it from that perspective but in the meantime i'm tom stevenson wishing you a wonderful day and we'll see you next time bye for now