Additional Situations

It has gotten to the point that you pretty much have to get a permit for anything you do to your house beyond  mowing  the grass. To issue the permit for many projects, the building department  wants a set of plans with pages showing the floor plan, foundation plan, roof plan and elevations from all sides. Some projects are small like a bedroom addition and all the required elements actually fit on one page. Other projects that add several rooms demand much more extensive plans.


              

                                                                              
This customer was a ways along in his project when he called.                                                           Though he knew exactly what he wanted when he went
You can get away a little digging and demo without a permit                                                                down to get a permit, he did not have a plan and was told
but that is as far as you dare go. He had everything figured                                                                he had to have one. That is when he called me and I quickly
and drawn out roughly on paper.                                                                                                          turned his sketches into working drawings that got him the permit 
                                                                                                                                                             and he went back to work on his project.

Though putting a new roof on this house was quite an involved process, the plans needed were quite simple and only cost the contractor about $300.




                                      



















   On the project above, I did not get involved until the rear of the house was demo'ed to this point. The contractor had no plan or even much of a design in mind. He just knew that his customer wanted a dining area and laundry on the ground level and a bedroom in the basement below. It did not take long to come up with something that fit the bill.

                                        


   This what we came up with on the drawing board.





























  One reason that I know how to draft          The contractor hired me to frame this            The contractor liked our work and so he          We got the outside tied together just fine
plans is because I have been framing     project. The stairs fit great like I knew             kept us around to side and paint the exter-     and then went inside and did the painting
for more than 30 years. I don't know       would because even though I did not know     as well.It is not always easy to marry an           and finish carpentry.
how many times I have framed off a        I would be framing this when I was drawing,     addition to an existing house, especially             When I sit down at the drawing board I am
set of plans that did not give the             I was thinking of the framer as a framer           when the house is an 1 1/4" out of level          able to visualize each step of the building
stairwell enough headroom.                    which few draftsmen are able to do.                 from side to side like this one.                         process because i've done it from start to
                                                                                                                                                                                                                finish dozens and dozens of times.