Commercial Blueprints

Elly Hart is a site lead on multi-family developments in Vancouver, Canada. Born and raised in Australia, she was an award-winning journalist writing and editing stories about consumer technology. In 2012, Elly traveled to Canada for a short working holiday and never left. She picked up woodworking, which inspired her to quit her desk job. In 2015, she signed up for a four-year carpentry apprenticeship. Her job site experience started with renovations for a design-build company before moving on to multi-family developments where she worked her way from apprentice to lead carpenter to assistant site superintendent. Elly graduated from the apprenticeship program with distinction in 2019, holds a Certificate of Qualification (Red Seal) in carpentry, and is currently working towards a degree in construction management. She is dedicated to challenging public perceptions of the construction industry and advancing the skilled trades through education and mentorship.

Learn how to navigate commercial blueprints and construction drawings, and apply these concepts on a real job.

Class Overview – Meet your instructor, Elly, a carpenter and site lead in Vancouver, as she shares her journey with you and discusses the importance of being able to read commercial blueprints.

Residential vs Commercial Drawings – Residential blueprints and commercial blueprints have a lot in common and plenty of differences. Elly teaches you the basic distinctions between them.

Title Sheets & Project Statistics – The title sheet lays out the what and the why of a project, the context, and the scope of work. Learn to read this crucial and often-overlooked page.

LEED & Built Green Requirements – Built Green and LEED are environmental standards that are increasingly applied to commercial builds. Learn to navigate these requirements and the tradeoffs associated with them.

Window Schedule – Schedules provide detailed information about specific building components like walls, doors, windows, and hardware that may appear multiple times throughout a building.

Door Schedule – Learn even more about how schedules function on a commercial build with this deep dive into doors.

Site Plan – The site plan is a bird’s eye view of everything contained within the property lines of your build, and contains critical information that will be especially helpful during pre-construction.

Demolition & Retention – Demolition and retention drawings are used in renovations: they show you what gets demolished and what stays in place.

Floor Plans – Floor plans are often considered to be the most consequential drawings in a set of blueprints. Elly shows you how to navigate them and use them as the basis for surfacing and solving problems on your build.

Reflected Ceiling Plans – Reflected ceiling plans, or RCPs, give you additional context about ceiling construction than is often included in the floor plans.

Sections – Section views show you a building from the side, as though it were sliced like a layer cake. This useful perspective can help you understand how the whole building fits together.

Detail Drawings – Detail drawings show you how specific elements of the building should be constructed. Here, Elly demonstrates how to find the information you need to build a key component of commercial builds: the exit stairs.