New Life for Old Houses by George Stephen

Author:George Stephen [Stephen, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486149691
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

You should now be ready to draw up your house or room from the measured survey—always allowing for the fact that, if you don’t live in it, you will almost certainly have to return at least once to check suspicious dimensions, to find out how high the window sills really are where you propose to have a new kitchen, or to find out finally just which walls and partitions are holding up the house!

Drawing Up from the Measurements

If one is just drawing up a room for a furnishing plan the only tools required are a pencil, a straightedge of some sort, and a sheet of squared paper; the squares should be preferably one fourth of an inch, so that each one will represent one foot of the real room at a scale of ¼″ = 1′-0″. The procedure is straightforward and needs no description.

For drawing up a whole house or floor, however, or if one wants to graduate from the rather unsophisticated squared-paper technique, a few extra tools are needed: a small drawing board, a T square or parallel rule, a triangle, a pair of compasses or a circle template, and an architect’s scale. An engineer’s scale should not be used because the feet are subdivided into tenths instead of twelfths of inches, which are more generally used and are standard in the building world; remember that however strongly one may feel about the superiority of the decimal system, the builder’s rule is not divided into tenths of a foot and he will be understandably reluctant to perform feats of mathematics in order to build the job.

The basic tools are illustrated on the opposite page. The drawing board need not be larger than about 30″ × 24″ for the average drawing of a floor of a house and in many cases a smaller one will suffice; likewise, the basic T square and triangle are all that is needed for the best work. The parallel rule and adjustable triangle shown in the second illustration are standard tools of the architect, but they are a little more expensive and are not really necessary unless they are going to be used often. Also, a cheap pair of school compasses—the kind that holds the stub of a pencil—will draw door swings as well as on the best architectural models (the author has to confess that his most reliable pair of compasses was purchased in his early youth from a well-known international “five and ten” and has outlasted most of his more pretentious circle-making equipment).

Armed, then, with these simple and relatively inexpensive instruments, you have all that is necessary to produce the best drawings—the rest is up to you.

Using a pencil that is a little harder than the one used for the survey (say an H or 2H), you can proceed to draw up the plan from the measured sketch and notes. A medium grade of tracing paper—neither too rough nor too greasy—should be used and held down to the board on all four corners by small tabs of masking tape.

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