drafts·man/ˈdraf(t)smən:

• A person who makes detailed technical plans or drawings.

Working with a draftsman is essential in not only getting a feel for what your space can be, but to provide necessary documents for permit issuance. This is a recap of my experience working with our incredible draftsman and team.

A draftsman can be used when hiring an architect is not required. It’s generally a bit cheaper to go this route for home renovations that do not require major structural changes. Thankfully for us, our changes are big, but nothing affects load-bearing walls or adding on to the existing structure of the house. 

Our main purpose in hiring a draftsman was:

• To create “as-is” drawings of the home (needed for permit)
• Fine-tune our vision
• Create our “dream home” in phases (I’ll go into more detail on this below)
• Create functional space
• Supply us with the drawing and code notes required for the permit

About the house:

It’s a 1970’s home that was converted into a surveyor’s office. They turned the garage into an office- THEN they built another garage. And then turned that into an office too. The space is 3,600 square feet when you include the two converted garages. It’s a really odd layout. It was not easy to figure out how to best utilize the existing design. 

The Team:

The team we chose was a father and son duo. The process took a bit of time. We had to get an “as-is” drawing since there was nothing on the county record and then we had to come up with a functional design, keeping in mind our budget.

They were great to work with. Our first task was to send them a “rambling list”. They wanted to understand our goals for the house and to get an idea of our taste. I broke this list down to every room in the house. No detail was too small. They wanted me to send everything! I’m a mom to 4 little beasts – lists are my thing!  The rambling list was surprisingly easy for me. I used google docs to share my list with the team. Since I am a visual person, I included pins from my Pinterest albums for each room. This was extremely helpful to the draftsman. It enabled them to see my style and vision. During the COVID era, this sort of technology and communication was fantastic and really helped move the process along as fast as possible. 

Here are some samples of what this “Rambling List” looked like:

Honing in on the first drawing from the Draftsman:  

The first drawing the team submitted was a dream. It was everything we wanted! 

• Built-ins every mom dreams of! 
• A perfect laundry room
• A master bathroom that was something like 19′ x 11′
• Little alcoves and key drops, knee walls, and more

Once we had the drawing, we went out and did our work to get quotes. (I’ll write an article about finding the right contractor… that’s a blog post in of itself!) Once we got some rough pricing, we discovered we needed to break this project into phases. 

We scheduled a successful zoom meeting where we broke the news to our draftsman about removing all of the built-ins. After a second draft, we still weren’t in love with the master bathroom. It was too big (which means more materials and labor) and we just didn’t like the overall feel and placement and it was going to be too costly for us to execute the design.

We had a great relationship with our cabinet company. We talked to them about the layout. They introduced us to a plumber who actually sketched on paper my vision for the master bathroom. Then our incredible cabinet guys drew up the bathroom on his CAD program and we sent that to our draftsman. It was truly a team effort. After that drawing was sent, 24 hours later we had our final drawings. 2 weeks after that we filed for the permit. 

Here are a few photos of the “As-is” vs the new design:

Key takeaways:

• The rambling list was fun to do. I mean, who doesn’t want to create a dream home list, complete with photos?!
• Realizing the “rambling list” is just a starting point is somewhat like losing a little wind in your sail… but it’s a great place to start, because if you’re like us, you can break your project into phases.
• Receiving the first draft was a little confusing to us. We didn’t realize we had so much leg work left to do after the initial drawing. We had to now figure out how to price things out and decide what to eliminate.
• From the deposit and signing the contract, to receiving the final permit drawings, it was approximately 11 weeks.

If you’re reading this to follow along with our build, or just because you are thinking about your own renovation project, I hope you found it useful! 🙂

Blue skies,
Heather Anne Marchand