Monday, June 8, 2009

Lumber layouts help you go green

When I design homes for my Columbia area clients,
I provide lumber layouts for all of my plans and have been doing so for years. They do a couple of things for the buyer. First, the contractor can see the sizes of material I'm using and make an accurate count of material. This helps the contractor bid the job closer and usually a little cheaper. Lots of contractors don't bother to do an accurate takeoff themselves, they just let the lumberyard rep do it. If your fellow goes that way, the layout drawing is used by the rep to get the right number, size and length of materials, and later the same drawing is used by the framer to see where all of those pieces go. If less material goes to the job, less material is wasted, or made into scaffolds, or lays around in the weather to go bad. Another thing these drawings do for me, is to help me calculate how the loads of the building are transferred downward through the building into the foundation. If you have a slab or basement, and you know ahead of time which walls carry the loading, you know where to thicken the slab before it's too late! Even with trusses or I joists or other components, care taken in the design stage means less waste on the job site.

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