hi I'm Tom Stevenson and welcome to print reading today we're going to be looking at how to read a set of construction drawings that's set up for a residential edition if you're in the renovation sector remodeling sector and you do additions on houses this would be what a set of drawings would typically look like I'm using a set of tack box details and that just simply means Toronto area Chief Building officials committee did up these drawings and they're like a sample drawing of what they would expect for drawings that are submitted for a residential addition to a house now if you've been watching previous videos in the series where we've been going through different elements like floor plans and site plans and elevations these are very similar it's just that you're dealing with an existing house and you're adding something to it if you want to go back in this series I have links listed below and you can go back and you can watch launch a series of the videos you can click subscribe that helps build the community it helps get more hits so that people keep viewing the actual videos so please do that I'm a professor of construction management and I've been teaching this for decades and I've been working with construction Professionals in all the different sectors in construction so there's a lot of different viewpoints and nuances that go on and you'll pick these up in the different videos I also have videos on project management planning and scheduling MS project that you may find of Interest construction business management as well on my playlists on my site okay let's get started so right off the bat I've got a site plan here and the site plan which we've explained in other videos is essentially the building lot and the house that's on it now you'll notice that there's kind of a hatching and it says proposed one-story Edition so this is what's being added to the house the existing house stops here and you're adding this onto the back proposed deck and of course it has a compass orientation to say that this is North all right so we can see what the setbacks are for the house from the property lines and we can see that this has a proposed deck as I mentioned on it and usually what I like to do is I like to sort of review the different pages fairly quickly so I can conceptualize what's going on when I get a new set of drawings so yes I want to look at the site plan I want to look at the parameters if you're visiting the site you want to make sure that things go correspond and make sense to you you want to look at the existing buildings on each side these days too with Google Maps you could have a drive-by and even if you're not at the site yet get a good sense of the site see the houses how close they are to each other proximity because don't forget you're going to be building on this particular site you've got to be looking at well what's going to be the access to the rear of the house and how easy is that going to be and to bring in can we bring in a excavator do we have to use a mini excavator what's involved here so I usually go down and of course at the bottom on the site plan it's got a whole bunch of information now these drawings are in metric because I'm in Canada I'm very familiar with Imperial trust me half most of our low-rise buildings they're done in Imperial because these are done by building officials our building code is in metric so you might see the measurements those are in millimeters you just substitute feet and inches on you know residential drawings in Canada or us or other locations usually this kind of information has to do with zoning and Zoning is in particular looking at what are you allowed to do on this lot and there's usually a lot of constraints that each town or city will have same for example how far you can have the front of the house from the property line how much coverage can the house have on the overall Pro property as a percentage you know these are some examples but again zoning is like one of these enigmas that can change from state to state and Province to Province and town to town and City to City mostly town to town and City to City because it's usually a municipal restrictions that are applied so you can see that's all that and I'm not going to get into too much detail on that because it varies so much for area but what you do need to know is does this satisfy when it says like percent allowed does it satisfy these requirements that the city has because they're going to review it and if it doesn't they're going to give it back to you and say well no you're you're over the allowed gross floor area for this site or you're overly allowed lot coverage for this particular site so let's move on that's the site plan all right so now we're at the basement plan also referred to as a foundation plan and you can sort of see the hatching this is what's new this is what's being added to this particular building this is what's existing so it's not it's kind of looking like it's got not too much detail but where you've got the hatching you see a lot more detail a lot more measurements because this is telling you how big this addition is going to be on this house and you're seeing basically the width and you can see the length and then you can also see the addition of the deck and the size of the deck and the center lines for basically the sonnet tubes that'll be supporting the deck here you also see these hexagon symbols and we've talked about those they're very frequently used they're not always used but very frequently used to reference construction notes so when we go further down you'll see towards the end there's a set of construction notes very often construction notes are on the first page of the drawings in this case they happen to be on the last page of the drawings but that doesn't really matter as long as you've got a reference point and then if I read up on that it's going to give me information like perhaps this is going to give me information about the concrete for the floor slab that's going to go in this is going to perhaps give me information about the wall that's being removed so you can sort of see what it would be referring to like number two should give me information regarding the foundation the foundation walls the footing sizes Etc and you also notice at first look there is like an A and an A and that's a cutting plane line that means somewhere there's going to be a section that cuts through this and is looking to in that direction that the arrow is pointing so there's going to be a cut through of the house that we can sort of see inside what's going on so I'm always looking for cutting plane lines so I know okay there's going to be a section detail that I can look at and refer to to understand better what's going on in this wall all right and so that's basically the basement plan sometimes referred to as the foundation plan and all the existing stuff that's there now we're at the first floor and again you can kind of see what's new going on all through here by looking at the hatchings here so when I can zoom in on this a little bit that hatching is is a hatching for Brick this other hatching is a hatching for insulation so that's telling me several things one I'm going to have a brick veneer on the outside too it's going to be a wood frame wall on the inside with bad insulation is what it's looking like all right so let's give me some pretty good information there again I can see the dimensions of the addition how much it's going out and the size of the deck so all of that information with the extension lines and dimension lines are there I can also see there's a solid masonry fireplace here so a solid masonry fireplace usually we don't do too many solid masonry fireplaces anymore usually we're more likely to use like a gas insert or something like that although if you're in a more rural area they're still reasonably popular but usually they have a insert and because you want to capture as much heat as possible plus people often don't like dealing with cutting wood and logs and putting it in a natural wood fireplace but you can still do it so we've got that cutting plane line going through you can see here these dashed lines all right so see all these little dashed lines there and see the dash lines going right through here and you can see where there is existing windows so these These are existing windows and that's the existing wall and that's got to come out because this is going to be opened up so the addition is going to come it's going to come out here and this is going to be open so this kitchen is going to open out into this breakfast area right or whatever you want to call it here so we've got that there and it's going to be wide open wide open and it's going to put in 438 by 235 so it's going to be a built up wood beam so four pieces of Two by Two by twelve or two sorry two by ten is going to go in there so four pieces of two by ten are going to go in that spot right over top and we'll look at the section detail again it's showing that a a that's how I know it's going to go through the whole house it's on each floor and we'll look at well how is that going in over top are we going to have a flush ceiling between the two rooms is it going to drop down what's going to go on there we can also see the closet and we can see the doors and look there's a number so number two number four that's indicating to me that there is going to be a door schedule somewhere for these new doors that we're going to be installing like here there's going to be a linen closet put in with a bathroom there's gonna be see these walls the dash lines again those are going to come out they must be existing and then those are going to come out so that's going to be put into that place and it looks like originally there was an attic access over here all right and I'm going to assume that's going to come out you don't want the attic access in the middle of the bathroom ceiling and it's being placed over here so that's going to be moved over to there that attic access hatch we can also see the direction now we could have seen now in the on the first floor but we can see the direction of the rafters and collar ties that's going in here and what what's that's referring to right uh we can go down here and again see the layout usually I'll think about from a drawing perspective you know you come in the front door this is all existing stuff and then oh through here we're going to see everything new this will all be gutted and there'll be a new kitchen put in and then oh there's going to be a doorway here and this is going to open up so part of this is existing room area but we're taking out walls so that basically this was probably a bedroom before and so that's why these walls here are going we want to put in this bathroom here so that we can see it nice and wide open into the bedroom and we're going to have this nice walk-in closet to the left so you're trying to visualize this azure going through this now let's take a little bit of a look on the outside what's going on well on the outside we have um we have an addition put onto the house as we said we've got a masonry chimney up here uh we've got a addition going on to the uh back of the house so on the side elevation the East Elevation we can see the uh brickwork and we can see the existing so we see the brickwork here and the the addition going on and then this is all existing it says all to remain so this roof here is going to be built on top and it looks like it's a hip roof okay it's going to be built on top of the existing roof so you're gonna have to line up the slope you're going to do probably what uh lay down uh plate on the roof and then your Jacks are going to run down to the existing roof over here the other side same idea except this window which probably was like in maybe there was an existing bathroom there or that maybe that was the bedroom uh one of the bedroom windows so here that's going to be bricked up because that's going to be closed in so good idea probably just some advice I'd be looking at this and I'd be thinking okay we'll never match the brick uh but when you take down that rear wall to open up for the addition save some of those brick and then you can fill this in so at least this is a match if you get a pretty close match here you can you know have a just a vertical joint here maybe you put a downspout over here to kind of hide it those are some little tips and tricks you can do when you're actually doing construction if that works you notice the slope says one to two I never really see that uh usually it's always a ratio to 12 but if I did see that I know that that just means six to twelve right one to two one to two is the same as six to twelve all it means is for every for every two inches you go along you go up one inch right for every 12 inches you go all along you go up six inches it'll give you the same slope um so if you ever see that where it's like a ratio and it's like why isn't it to 12 you can easily adjust it um to suit 12 usually especially if it's done with even numbers uh okay so we've got that addition we've got we can see also these sauna tubes here and the sonotubes and the deck and that's going out there so that's going to be for that deck that we saw in plan View and so oh there we go there's that section detail let's rotate that so I'm just going to rotate this on my drawing here so that you can see it there it is all right so now we've got this we've got this section detail AAA remember those cutting plane lines a a that's cutting through this Edition so basically I can see the footings I can see the weeping tile I can see um the foundation wall and again we've got all of these reference numbers so that we can really come to grips with what are the materials that are being used there is that built up wood beam that I was discussing with you so the built up wood beam is going across there um and that's going to be supporting over the opening there and so you're gonna have a flush ceiling through here I noticed that the joists are moving out here in the addition it's going across notice it just goes up there not really a fan of that it's got like a little bump in the ceiling in the basement you might want to think about that that you would want to build this down maybe to have it flush usually ceiling height is at a premium so that's the other thing with basements that would be a decision that would have to be made at some point but it wouldn't be structural if this has basically been designed for a certain size it wouldn't have to be structural for that reason okay so we've got that and we've got that section detail going through okay let's go to the next sheet and let's bring those around all right so this is where all those hexagon symbols are and this is where you find out detailed information about the walls brick veneer wall like I said information about the face brick the airspace uh there's always an airspace between the brick and the framing uh foundation wall look there's where the footing sizes are found 450 by 150. to bear on undisturbed soil and so it basically is giving you the detailed information that you need to know about the concrete footing so on this particular video I just wanted to introduce you to the references how the Edition is laid out and some of the detailed information and I'm just going to scroll up and we've looked at the west elevation and it's basically by Compass Direction we've talked about in the previous videos the East Elevation I'll maybe shrink this down a little bit uh the north elevation and then all of that information uh here on the floor plan the first floor plan the foundation plan so there's another built up wood beam that we saw in the section detail that's going to go across the floor joist Direction so they're basically for the first floor they're going in this direction here all right these are the existing direction of the existing floor joists always nice to know especially if you're thinking about running ductwork and some of the issues that you may run into with regards to things like duct work and things of that nature number one you've got ductwork here and it's showing going through there I'm just hypothesizing right now live looking at this I would be looking at my section detail going down here and I'll just circle that around again and you see how this is like here right so you got a beam there you're not gonna be able to run Ducks through a beam so that might cause some bulkheads or some interesting discussions on what's the best way to run your ductwork to get into this area when you've got a beam going across and the beam you'd look at that you say okay well how's that ductwork going to get into there and you'd run back up here and I'll just rotate that around here this is running through there right so that looks pretty easy doesn't it but it might not be so easy you might have to detail something for that ductwork to get in there which might not be um so pleasant depending on how uh that's laid out all right so hope you've enjoyed this introduction to this renovation set of drawings I'm going to do a follow-up where I'm going to go in a little bit more detail into each one but as I've said in previous videos you really want to orient yourself to what's going on the site the spatial requirements the overall layout go through each drawing get a little bit familiar and then you can get into the Weeds about where you're starting and how you're going to go and approach the construction of this particular project and any potential problems that you might see like I was just pointing out with the ductwork um so I'm Tom Stevenson I hope you enjoyed this quick video on uh how to read drawings for a residential Edition don't forget that the hexagons are your reference points there you're cutting plain lines will show you a detail on another drawing to reference that you're looking inside the building and don't forget to click subscribe and we'll see you next time bye for now