J.T. Pennington - Week 7 Lessons Learned

Week 7: October 9th - 13th, 2017

Lessons learned/reflections: Part of this week I have been drafting the existing conditions of a residence in one of the historic districts of downtown Charleston. We often talk about collaboration in studio and in professional enviornments, but I think there can be advantages of continuity of tasks if are completed by the same person.

In my opinion, there is an advanage of the person photographing and measuring an existing building to drafting the existing conditions. While I think it's important to be able to draft existing conditions that someone else has provided is important, a personal experience of the building really helps. Even though we have taken 215 photographs of the existing building, having been there myself allows me to make this task easier.

Images of work completed:

First floor sketch that I made on Sept 29th on site . This is the first floor bathroom that is next to the kicthen; you can see this building drafted in the below plan.

Here's another style of a different building that I measured a few weeks ago; I like this style better because I am poching the exterior walls and showing sills and thicknesses of doors and windows. It also takes more time to make a sketch like this, and time is money while field measuring (and you're burning daylight)!

Sketch from a coworker of field measurements. Notice how they use contrasting colors (red walls, blue for annotations). The most important measurement here is the thicknesses of the walls, which I wrote about in my previous blog entry.

First floor plan of the residence with red revision clouds for areas of the plan that I don't have resolved, or we are missing dimensions from our field measurements. I also clouded a few items that I carefully read the notes from filed measurements but when I draft them in software they aren't working out in plan.

Second floor plan - my biggest question here is the depth exterior walls at the bathroom. I know that from the wall to the jamb is about 23" before the start of the frame and sash, and I have overall dimensions at the bathroom - but I'm not sure how the exterior walls work with plaster, wood framing and insulation, and exterior finishes. We'll have to investigate further next week.