Saturday, December 19, 2009

What is a Site Plan

Even before a set of architectural drawings is created, it’s necessary to determine if a building will fit on a piece of real estate. This is where a site plan comes into play. No complete set of architectural plans is really complete without the site plan. A site plan, also known as a plot plan, is a drawing representing a piece of property where a building is going to be placed or remodeled.

What’s included in a Site Plan

Boundaries: The boundary is the measurement and angles of lines that defines a piece of real estate. These are measured by using coordinates of a line with their distance from one point to the other. For instance if a lines coordinates are N32d15’32”E ~ 325.0’, it means the line is started in a north easterly section that is angled thirty two degrees, fifteen minutes, thirty two seconds by a distance of three hundred twenty five feet. After all the boundary lines are complete it should represent a closed area.

Building Footprint: This is the representation or drawing of the perimeter of the structure that is to be built on the property. This will include porches, and decks attached to the house.

Setbacks and Easements: Setbacks are the lines where local municipalities have ordered that a structure cannot cross and easements are where utilities like sewer or power lines cross the properties area.

Roadways: These are the roads that are touching the property. If no road is accessible from the land a right of way must exist so that the owner can have access to their property.

Driveways and Walkways: These show where vehicle access, parking and foot access are located in relation to the house.

Utility Locations: This is where access to services like water, power, sewer, or septic tanks are shown on the drawings.

Topography: A representation of the surface features of a piece of property, indicating their relative positions and heights of the ground.

Tim Davis is a seasoned drafter and teacher who has developed a class on drawing site plans at http://siteplans.8m.com/ This course is part of his classes on how to draw complete house plans at http://homedesign.8m.com which can be taken separately or together.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

A Review Of The Drafting 101 Courses

If you have an interest in drawing things like houses or mechanical stuff, you have no doubt searched on Google or Yahoo for “how to draw house plans” or “how to draw woodworking drawings” and found House Plan Drafting 101 or Mechanical Drafting 101. These were written by a veteran architectural designer and general draftsman named Tim Davis. This fellow is from the old south and his charming way of explaining things is very evident in his work.

I enrolled in both of these courses and have nothing really bad to say about them at all. Actually I have nothing but praise. It was hard sometimes to get things clear in my head by that wasn’t my instructors fault! Tim put forth a very simple, and straightforward set of instructions that would help anyone involved in learning architectural or mechanical drawing to understand the subject being taught.

I did learn that drawing on a drafting board is a fading art. Computer Aided Drafting or CAD for short, is the way of the world now. Tim however suggested learning on the drafting board also, simply because of the way it developed discipline.

The instructor spent a considerable amount of time teaching the architectural drafting student to look for omissions and mistakes, and went into depth about every aspect needed to put out a quality finished product. Once I completed all of these very under priced courses, I was equipped to draw house plans that were more than suitable to build from and submit to a building inspector.

He also spent just as much time in the mechanical drawing course as he did in the architectural to again make sure that the students drawings were complete and error free. When I had a question, I simply went to his message board, posted my question and very quickly received an answer to my problem. Tim is a minister and pastor now and uses the proceeds of the courses to fund an online ministry called The Parsons Corner.

Copyright 2009
J.Q.P. is an online article writer and web resource critic.
House Plan Drafting 101 can be found at http://homedesign.8m.com
Mechanical Drafting 101 can be found at http://draftingservice.us/m101/
The Parsons Corner can be found on the web at http://parsonscorner.org

Posted with permission of the Author

Saturday, December 5, 2009

A Career in Drafting

No matter how bad the economy gets, there is always a need for drafters. Drafters are the ones who create technical construction drawings from information given to them by professionals like architects, engineers, designers, and surveyors. Drafters create drawings and plans on a drafting board or Computer Aided Drafting and Design program. These drawings are then used by craftsmen to build various projects or products.

Below are a few of the fields drafters are need in:

Architecture:
Architectural drafters prepare drawings of buildings, and houses.

Engineering and Civil:
These drafters prepare drawings for roadways, structural drawings for large commercial buildings, topographical surveys, steel fabrication drawings, etc.

Survey:
Survey drafters work for surveyors laying out land boundaries, topography, building and structure locations, etc.

Industrial:
These drafters are used in manufacturing plant layout, product illustration and cut sheet drawings, assembly drawings, etc.

Tim Davis, a fully trained general drafter with 20 plus years experience, has created a virtual drafting school where many of these drafting disciplines are taught in a easy to understand format at http://101info.org.