Project 101-Design Process and Drawings...

I am one of those lucky artists that has a full time job in addition to my Etsy shops and blog and social life...I'm busy to say the least! But I love my day job as an interior designer and wouldn't trade it for anything! I get to help our clients obtain the homes of their dreams and see the fruition of long hours spent designing, drawing, dealing with conractors and vendors, writing and managing orders and dealing with the many headaches that come up day to day. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love it!! I thought I would start occassionally showing projects that I have worked on and give you a glimpse into what it takes to be an interior designer!

The first project I'm going to share was in a condo building on Michigan Avenue...it was a gut renovation that we did for a family of three. The place was original to the building (built in the 70's) when we got our hands on it and needed a lot of updating to say the least! My initial job was to take a field measure of the space and draw the plan in CAD in order to do a set of construction documents from start to finish. In my first post, I'm going to share those documents with you readers so you have an idea of the amount of work that goes into each project! Let's begin!

The first drawing in the set (after the title page) is the demolition plan:

Demolition Plan

The demo plan is just what it sounds like. On this plan, the contractor sees the original space and is told what we want him to "demolish" as well as what is staying. In this project, we moved the kitchen to the window wall and reconfigured the bathrooms as well as one of the bedrooms.

The next drawing in the set is the parition plan which shows the contractor what we want him to build (i.e. new walls, new plumbing locations, millwork locations, etc.):

Partition Plan

The third drawing is the reflected ceiling plan or RCP which shows the new lighting layout as well as any changes we are making to the ceiling:

RCP

The fourth group of drawings in the set are the enlarged plans, which are portions of the smaller drawing blown up to a larger scale in order to show greater detail to the contractor (I'm not including these...don't want to bore you!).

The fifth set of drawings are the elevations which usually include the kitchen, bathrooms and any other areas we are having the contractor build something special. These are the most fun for me to do because they're a glimpse of what the place is actually going to look like (and they're really fun to draw!). There are normally three or four sheets of elevations depending on the project:
Kitchen Elevations

Master Bathroom and Library Elevations

Secondary Bathroom Elevations

I'm going to skip the sixth set of drawings which are the plumbing, appliance and door schedules...just lists of items that will be installed and where they are going.

The final group of drawings in the set are details and sections. These are blown up sections of various areas where we need to show the contractor exactly how we want him to build something. These are extremely important in making sure that the final outcome is what we are envisioning. Here is just one of the sheets of details for an idea:

Details

Well, there you have the set of drawings in a nutshell!!! I'm actually going to post the second half of this project tomorrow...I'm sure you're all tired of listening to me ramble on about the drawing process!! Stay tuned...I'm going to post before and after photos!