The right details on the right page ensures everyone stays on the same page

Successful drawings tick two boxes: they are complete and they are comprehensive. While providing complete details and dimensions is certainly critical, ensuring that your drawings are also comprehensive is something most designers overlook. And yet, failing to provide comprehensive drawings can have a big impact on your estimates and outcome. Because if something’s not on the drawing, you won’t get it. Period.  

Drawings are to construction crews what sheet music is to an orchestra. In an orchestra, the tuba player isn’t given sheet music with notes for all the other instrumentalists, because that would make it impossible for them to focus on their role in the performance. Instead, their sheet music only shows the notes that tuba player needs to perform their specific part. 

In the construction-world, the same idea applies. Yet all too often, we’re now seeing designers (the conductors if you want to continue along with this analogy) consolidate information on the mechanical drawings, leading to miscommunication and misquoting. 

Whether it’s the estimator for the carpet, the estimator for the painting, or the person that’s quoting the glass doors – all of these trades provide a price based solely on what they’re reading from their desk. If the information is not on the specific drawing they’ve received, the estimator is not going to search through the mechanical drawings (or frankly get out from behind that desk and go to the job site) to cross-reference whether something has been missed or misinterpreted. 

Whether it’s at the quoting phase or on-site, cohesively layering and ordering of your drawings so that the right things appear on the right page, helps ensure that everyone stays on the same page. A clear drawing simultaneously condenses details for the relevant parties who need to see them; but also provides a more expansive picture of your design intent through cohesive notes.

As an aside – many designers forget that while you can easily tab and search for notations within a drawing on your computer, your estimators and construction crews are flipping through drawings printed on three-foot pieces of paper. Try doing this and you’ll quickly see how challenging it becomes to cross-reference small details. 

Your construction manager is the best person to troubleshoot whether your drawings are not only complete but comprehensive and therefore comprehensible by everyone on site. We’ll often be called into work with designers early on in the process to collaborate on drawings – and we’d be happy to do the same for you.