Keeping a Civil Set Consistent

Keeping a Civil Set Consistent

A Grade 12 civil submission is a set: site plan, floor plans, elevations, sectional elevations, roof plan and service layouts. Its most common defect is not a bad drawing but two drawings that disagree.

What must agree across the set:

• Every opening's position and width, between plan and elevation.
• Every level — floor, sill, head, wall plate, ridge — between the sectional elevation and the elevations.
• The building's position and footprint, between the site plan and the floor plan.
• Fixture positions, between the floor plan and the service layouts.

Work from a single source. Establish levels once on the sectional elevation and project them onto every elevation. Establish openings once on the plan and project them up. Re-measuring a feature on a second drawing is how sets drift.

Check systematically at the end. Take each opening in turn and verify it in every drawing it appears on. It is tedious and it is what a plan checker does.

Worked example. A window shown at 900 mm sill on the sectional elevation but drawn at 1 000 mm on the north elevation will be built to whichever the bricklayer reads first, and the other drawing is then wrong on site.

Core checkpoint: Establish each value once, then project it. Never measure the same feature twice.