paige_ellis59•2mo agoProlific Poster

PSA: I tracked my first 50 drafting revisions and the number blew my mind

I started keeping a log of every single revision request I got on drawings for the last three months. After 50 revisions across 8 different projects, I noticed nearly half of them were because of something I misread on the initial site survey. That is way too many. A specific example was a floor plan for a commercial build in Austin where I drew the wrong column spacing because I skimmed the field notes too fast. It cost me an extra 4 hours of rework. Now I double check every dimension against the survey before I even open AutoCAD. Has anyone else ever run a count on their own revision reasons and found a pattern like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

wade_perez2mo ago

Buddy of mine from my last job did this same exact thing. He was a structural guy, not MEP. He kept a spreadsheet for six months and found out over 60% of his revisions came from misreading the existing conditions report. One time he drew a whole foundation plan based on a soil report that said "silty clay" but it was actually "silty sand" because he swapped two columns in his notes. The contractor caught it halfway through excavation. Cost the firm like three grand in extra labor and concrete. He ended up laminating a checklist and taping it to his monitor.

gracea192mo ago

Yeah I started doing the same thing, caught a ton of errors just by slowing down.

emery8791mo ago

Man, that's the kind of thing that sticks with you. Once you burn yourself on something like that, you never forget to double check your columns. I've seen the same thing happen with elevation data more times than I can count. Someone reads the benchmark wrong and suddenly your slab is a foot lower than it should be. Slowing down and actually staring at the numbers before you start drafting is so basic but it saves a world of headache. That laminated checklist idea is smart too, keeps the basics right in your face.