Alright, so there's another video on this page that goes through reading construction drawings in about an hour and a half, and it goes fairly in-depth, but not everyone needs an in-depth view of how to read construction drawings from scratch. So I'm going to do a 10-minute crash course of reading construction drawings. So in the next 10 minutes, I'm going to see how much information I can throw at you. So this is going to go really fast. If at any point something doesn't make sense, make a note and then check out the hour and a half video I have and it'll go much slower and much more in depth.
I'll be pulling up this PowerPoint you see in front of you as well as an assignment we have for the ASU construction estimating course as well as a small set of plans where I just took a snippet of 14 pages from it. So here we go, 10 minute crash course of reading construction drawings. Construction drawings are broken into different sections.
The most common are civil, architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing. You'll also see ones such as fire protection or landscaping. Each one has a different letter that corresponds to it. So your site drawings is typically C which usually means civil, architectural A, structural S, mechanical M, electrical E.
Each one has things that are similar and things that are different. Each one will have something like details, sections, and elevations. However, they're going to show different parts. This is an example of a site plan.
So this right here is your building. So this is basically a very zoomed out version of your project. So this lets you know everything in the vicinity if you need to be worried about something.
Architectural, you're going to have your floor plan. This is going to be the majority of all of your dimensions that you need to worry about, as well as the room numbers and the type of room it is. Elevations show you the outside of a building as if you were standing on a street. So it's typically only the exteriors.
If you're looking at an interior, then you're looking at a cross section. So a cross section shows you if you were to splice the building in half and then stand there looking at the whole thing. So it'll show you multiple rooms at once, all from a side view. Details zoom in on one very specific thing that needs to be constructed in a certain way, wherein you need a lot of information, hence a lot of details, hence a detail view.
Your schedules is not a time schedule. It is a table that gives you a bunch of information, but in an organized format. So the most common are finish schedules, door schedules, and window schedules.
So it will tell you a door type, a room number, and information about the door. Structural will tell you things such as your foundation. So this is an example of a foundation plan. It will tell you what type your foundation is, where it needs to go.
This is an example of a roof framing plan. So this is a lot of lines in a lot of places. Some are sections, some are grid lines, some is the actual roof plan.
I'll get into lines in just a second. Mechanical We'll show you your HVAC system that goes all the way around that's heating, ventilation, and air conditioning HVAC. Then your plumbing will show you things such as your plumbing riser diagram which puts it all into 3D and shows you where in the building the plumbing needs to be. Electrical will show you all of your lights and all the connections.
This is one of the symbols wherein a rectangle with a X through it or a square with an X through it is going to be a light. So it'll then have a light schedule on the side which will tell you what the different kinds of lights are so that you know how to order them. There's a bunch of different types of lines in these drawings.
The three most common and the three most important are these bottom ones, an object line, a hidden line, and a center line or a column line. So a center line, column line, grid line, all the same. It's going to be a long dash, a very short one, long Those are just to give you a reference as to where you are on the page so that you can say, hey go to this page at grid line D8 and you know where to go.
An object line is actually pointing to this dark line so it's something that's solid and that is something you can see, it is tangible, it is part of the building on that page especially. A hidden line is something where it is part of the building however it cannot be seen on that page. In this example this is showing you the outline of a building. This hidden line is showing you the foundation underneath while the object line is showing you the actual building. In this instance, the foundation is actually hidden from view.
We are now going to jump into a set of plans to go through this real quick. On the right is all of the information you need. So this is going to tell you the actual page number. So again, it is sectioned into those most common pages.
So G means general in this case. It will tell you the actual project you're working on, the page information, any revisions or descriptions that are needed. a disclaimer, and then a company logo to tell you who created that page.
As you can tell, there might be different ones, whereas this one is by a different company. However, that information is still there and easily accessible. It's going to start with your generals, and almost every section will start with a set of notes. This will have notes, project directory, a sheet index telling you all sheets in the set, and symbols.
Symbols are one of your most important. If you are ever wondering what a symbol means, you should be able to find it on the cover page of that section of those drawings. Then if you go down you're going to get into more information and the abbreviations. Abbreviations is also one of the most important because the abbreviations will change for every set of plans.
There will be some that are the same but many will vary. Also keep in mind that if you go down, so that was in the general section, if I go down to our structural section there are new abbreviations. So depending on which section you're in make sure you're looking for the right abbreviations. There will also be new symbols for this and a new set of drawings for this.
If you look over here you can see we're now in structural 0.01 and this is all the architectural in the middle. We're going to jump back real quick to our symbols. All of these symbols mean something different, however some of them are going to be the same throughout every set of drawings. A section number will have a circle with an arrow. This is going to tell you go to section one on this page.
A detail looks almost the same, however there's no arrow. This will tell you to go to detail this on this page. Then you're going to have your window types, which is always a hexagon and a letter in it.
You're going to have construction notes, which are always a diamond with a number in it. These are some of the most important as they are everywhere. Now we're going to jump down to a floor plan. So this is in the architectural section. This is going to give us all of our dimensions.
So this shows you the entire building and you've got the grid lines B, E, H, H.4, J, 1, 2, 3. So that can give you a reference point right away. An example of a detail is right here on this restroom. wherein it shows go to detail 2 on page 2.11 and this box goes around it. So that is telling you that this restroom is shown on a 2.11 in further detail if you go to detail 2. If we jump down a little bit further, we're going to get into our elevations.
Elevations are where you can see the outside of the building as if you were standing on the street across from it. It will tell you all of your different heights and the finishes needed for the outside of the building. Keep in mind that the finished floor elevation is going to be one thing. while the top of building elevation will be another. In this case the finished floor elevation is 100 and the top of the building is at 128. The building is not 128 feet, the building is 28 feet because the finished floor elevation is 100. Finished floor elevation is one of the most common abbreviations at FFE and it's recommended that you know that.
All of these right here, right there, diamond, diamond, diamond, diamond, those are all keynotes. Keynotes can be found in the top right of most pages. Some of them will be located in different areas. However, for this set, they're all in the top right.
We jump down now and we have a door schedule. So this will tell you all the information that you need to know for every door on the project. It's also an immediate way to know how many doors are on the project instead of having to go through and count them.
This will tell you the different types of doors in the project. And if we go down a little bit further, we'll see the different types of windows in this project. So these are all the types of windows.
There are many, many of them because this is a car dealership, so it's very open. These are all details that are within the drawing. As you can see it will tell you the detail number and the page you are on 8.01.
However within the drawings the detail would have told you to go to this page. All of these different shading options indicate different materials. A 45 degree hash is masonry.
This is concrete. It is shaded and will have dots into it. Typically they're little tiny triangles if you zoom in. These squigglies that look like that one weird candy your grandma had that one time is insulation. There's also going to be stuff like this which is tile.
And over here, that is vinyl composite tile. If you're ever not sure, look at the keynote. That's keynote 9, so I go over here, keynote 9, vinyl composite tile as scheduled. The notes will always tell you what it is. Some of them will be consistent, some of them will not.
Masonry will always be a 45 degree hash, concrete will always look such as this, and insulation will always look like that. We're going to jump down again, and now we're in our general structural notes. These are typically called GSNs and will be referenced many times in the drawings where it will have a keynote that says refer to GSNs. That is what these are right here.
This has a lot of important information such as your code requirements. This is an example of a foundation plan. All of these dotted lines indicate hidden items, in which case this is continuous footing 2. Over here is your footing schedule, which will tell you the different types of footings as well as all of the dimensions needed for them. There are continuous footings, in which case they have no set length, they just go around the building, or there are isolated footings wherein they are always the same size and they are in one specific place. There also might be things that are only one common here or there, such as concrete floors, telling you that all of this needs to be concrete floor.
Jumping back up, if you have a line such as this that goes through a room, it is telling you that the room needs to be sloped. That will be a floor drain. This will be very common in bathrooms or places such as an oil storage wherein it is needed. If you look closer here, this is the same material designation I was talking about earlier.
A 45 degree line will always mean masonry, meaning this is a masonry building. This darker line around this area will indicate fire protection is needed because this is an electrical room and that's where they're most common. Finally, locating the scale, which may be one of the most important, is to first look at the page. You'll see the exterior elevation here.
This is the name of the page as a whole. If you look here, you see the west, north, east, and south elevations. That sections this page into different areas. Each page will have something like this, such as here, and the scale is always found directly under that. Make sure you check your scale not only on every page, but for every component of a page....
because it can vary. Alright, turns out I had an extra 30 seconds, so I'm going to go back through real quick and just decipher a lot of these lines, because deciphering the lines is one of the hardest parts of this, in my opinion. So here we have all of our grid lines.
Again, they have those dashes in the middle. These are all different dimension lines. They're showing nothing but the dimensions of the project. Each line goes through a different thing.
If you're looking at the dimensions, make sure you're being very precise, as each one is just a tiny bit different than the other. If you're looking at this, this is also a detail. So you're going to go around this and these darker lines show you the details.
This shows sloping where it has the x. This is another example of sloping into a trench drain. That's what this is going all the way around is a trench drain. You will have these ones which is the actual building around it and this is all masonry as you can see by the 45 degree hash lines and you have actual room numbers where it tells you the room name and the room number as well as additional dimensions.
Lines that are solid but hollow such as these indicate a typical wall so this will be nothing other than your framing. and that should take me to my 10 minute mark. So that is my 10 minute crash course on reading construction drawings.