Showerthought: Why does everyone overdraft their own floor plans? I finally get it now.

For years I thought adding every single hidden pipe and duct was the mark of a good drafter. Then I heard a foreman at a job site in Denver say, 'Son, we ain't building a museum, we need to see where to swing a hammer.' He showed me his markup on my drawing, basically half the detail was crossed out. Now I leave out the minor mechanical stuff unless someone asks for it, and my revisions have dropped by maybe 40 percent. Has anyone else had a moment where a contractor's feedback totally shifted how you draft?

3 comments

3 Comments

blair9909d agoMost Upvoted

Sounds like common sense finally kicking in.

alext529d ago

and honestly it goes deeper than that too. people forget that common sense is built on a foundation of lived experience, not just gut feelings. like when you're working the returns desk and someone brings back a drill battery that's been sitting in their garage all winter without being charged and wonders why it won't hold a charge. that's not common sense to someone who's never dealt with lithium ion batteries before. it's just a gap in their knowledge. so when people say "common sense finally kicking in" what they really mean is social pressure finally caught up with the behavior that was always going to get you in trouble.

cora8139d ago

That's not quite what common sense is though. Common sense is more about having a basic understanding of how things work in everyday life, not just giving in to social pressure. Like knowing you gotta charge a lithium battery before using it again, that's something you learn from experience or just basic logic about how rechargeable things work. But yeah, people who have never dealt with certain stuff won't automatically know it, same way a new homeowner might not know to clean their dryer vent until the thing almost catches fire. Still, there's a difference between not knowing something and ignoring basic cause and effect. What the foreman did wasn't social pressure, it was just showing me how buildings actually get put together instead of how architects draw them. That's experience teaching me something I was missing.