Our Services Explained – Building Permit Construction Drawings
Continuing our series of posts where we try to give potential clients some idea of what they’re buying, this post is about our basic construction drawings for obtaining a building permit. Our previous post on architectural renderings can be found here. Previously, all of the services we’ve discussed have been investigating original conditions or trying to translate a vision of our client into an idea of a building. This is where we start to try to turn that idea into a representation of reality. It’s where the rubber hits the road.
What’s Included – Permit Essentials
The goal of these drawings is a package of drawings to satisfy the permitting authorities. That can include the building inspector, planning department, flood zone manager, fire marshal, health department, etc. As you can see from that list, not every project will have the same requirements. A restaurant on the beach may have to satisfy all of these. A house in the middle of nowhere may only have one or two of them. Given that, we do price different jobs differently, depending on the number and depth of the drawings required.
Most projects will include floor plans, elevations, and sections. Most also will have a site plan, details, and window and door schedules. Any required structural specifications will be included. Some jurisdictions require at least some mechanical engineering, which we will generally outsource to experts unless it is extremely minimal.
Basically, the goal of these plans is to leave no questions as to code compliance or structural competence and building functionality for the permitting authorities. They should also provide any required guidance for the contractor to to provide the required materials and install them appropriately. One advantage of using a licensed professional for your plans is that we also provide that support through the permitting and construction process. No set of plans is perfect. Details are overlooked. Existing conditions aren’t quite right. Mistakes are made. Luckily, we’re a phone call away to help make adjustments or improvements as needed. We’ll cover that more in the future construction administration services post (stay tuned).
What’s not Included – Details Authorities Aren’t Interested In
You may have noticed that we have stressed the concept of code compliance and building performance. Because that is absolutely not enough detail to actually build a house. Now, many projects don’t need more than that. A self-build can make a lot of decisions as you go. If someone comes to us with a contractor attached (or if the client is a contractor acting as the client’s surrogate), there’s no need to do everything. For this reason, we’ve broken some services out of this level of construction drawings.
There are lot of decisions that have to be made to build a home (or business) that the permitting authorities don’t care about. Everything from paint colors and wall finishes, to hardware finishes and trim selections, to countertop and cabinet layouts and details. They’re all important, but typically excluded from our permit level drawings. These sorts of things can be decided later, during construction.
Often, these decisions can come down to what’s left in the budget. For this reason, we will either leave them entirely off of the drawings (paint colors generally don’t go on our drawings unless we’re doing an interior design for instance) or we switch to a generic performance specification (for instance, commercial door hardware has to meet certain code requirements and we want to make sure those are on the plans, but not the exact manufacturer or model or even finishes.)
We’ll go into more detail about how this works when we cover bidding services and interior design and other overlays to these sets, but for now, just know that if it doesn’t matter to protect your life, keep the building standing, or make sure the performance meets required minimums, that’s not included in this service.
Who Are These For?
That’s a misleading question, because they’re for almost every client. At least as a base layer. We take on very few projects that don’t at least intend to build, and therefore, almost every project will include some version of this service. If you’re looking to get competitive bids, you’d need a little more detail to make sure the bids are actually competitive. If you’re looking to get a very specific look and you want us to help you develop it, you’d need more. Basically, if you’re looking to build, we’ll include some version of this service and drawing package in our proposal.
And as a final note, the proposal does it’s best to predict the path a project will take and what the permitting authorities will require. However, we’re not perfect forecasters. Sometimes, a project takes a weird turn. Sometimes authorities change their requirements. In those situations, we fall back on our no surprises policy.
No Surprise Bills
We don’t want to surprise you with additional bills if the proposal missed because of our mistake or acts of building inspector or God (in the construction world, the two can wield uncomfortably similar levels of caprice and power.) If you’ve given us all of the data you had and haven’t driven these changes, that’s the risk we run to get you through the permitting and construction process.
We always say, we’d rather be called and brought into finding the solution to a problem rather than trying to sort whether the solution to a problem was enough after the fact. And our billing policies mirror that by not charging our clients who ask for our help. We won’t be shooting you a bill for an hour of our time for a 5 minute phone call or even a 3 hour detail we had to provide to the building official.
