That moment a senior drafter told me to stop over-dimensioning everything

I was working on a small commercial build last Tuesday, just a basic retail fit-out, and I had this drawing with like 47 dimensions on a single wall section. A senior guy, probably 25 years in the trade, walks over and says 'son, you're giving them so many numbers they'll pick the wrong one.' At first I was kind of defensive, I thought more info was always better. But he pulled up an old set of his drawings from 2008 with maybe 10 key dimensions and it was so much cleaner to read. I spent the next day stripping my sheet down and it honestly felt weird at first, like I was leaving stuff out. But then the GC called and said the framing crew had zero questions, which almost never happens. Has anyone else had that moment where you realized you were just adding clutter instead of clarity?

3 comments

3 Comments

stella_scott963d ago

Totally disagree. I'd rather have too many numbers than miss one. Contractors mess up way more when they have to guess or scale off the plan.

brooke_taylor443d ago

Overdimensioning is its own kind of mess though. Too many numbers just gives contractors more chances to misread something. I've seen guys ignore the plan entirely when it gets too cluttered. A clean, simple callout is way harder to screw up. Less really is more sometimes, don't you think?

shanec613d ago

Hear you loud and clear on this one. It's way too easy for a contractor to misread a plan when there's not enough info, and then you're stuck with something that doesn't match the drawing. I've seen guys try to scale off a fuzzy PDF and end up three inches off, which just causes headaches for everyone later. A few extra numbers on the page is a small price to pay for knowing the job will actually line up. So yeah, I'm with you on this.