We Make It Easy to Get House Plans in Saco, Maine

How to read an elevation drawing

An elevation is one face of the building drawn flat, straight on, with no perspective at all. There is normally one for each side, and they are the sheets your town, your builder and your eye all use for different reasons.

Start with which face you are looking at. Every elevation is labelled, usually by compass direction or by front, rear and side. Reading the wrong sheet is a surprisingly common way to approve the wrong thing.

Check the heights against the dimensions, not the drawing. Floor levels, window heads, the eave and the ridge are dimensioned on the sheet. The drawing is to scale, but the numbers are what get built.

Read the roof pitch where it is written. It appears as a small triangle with two numbers, rise over run. That symbol governs the shape of the whole building and it is the easiest thing on the sheet to miss.

Count the openings and cross-check them against the schedule. Every window and door on the elevation carries a mark that matches a row in the schedule. If the elevation shows nine windows on that face and the schedule lists eight, one of the two documents is wrong and better now than later.

Look at the proportions of the openings, not just their positions. How tall an opening is against how wide it is, and whether the spacing between them is even, is most of what makes a facade look right or wrong. On Saco's Main Street stock, where the original houses were built to careful proportions, this is the thing that will bother you for thirty years if it is off.

Read the material and trim callouts. Elevations carry notes naming what a surface is and where a trim element goes. That is where cornice, corner boards, water table and casing get specified.

Check the ground line. The elevation shows where the finished grade meets the building, and on a sloping site it will not be level across the face. That line tells you how much foundation shows.

Look at what the drawing says about the sides and the back. People study the front elevation and skim the other three. The back of a house is the one you look at from inside your own garden every day.

What an elevation cannot tell you

Knowing the limits of the sheet is as useful as knowing how to read it, and it stops people asking one drawing to do a job it was never designed for.

It has no depth. Everything is projected flat, so a porch, a bay or a recessed entry is shown at its true height and width and tells you nothing about how far it sticks out. For that you need the floor plan or a section.

It is not a perspective and it will not look like the finished house. Nothing gets smaller as it goes back, so a building can look flatter and wider on an elevation than it will standing in front of you. This is the single most common reason people are surprised on site, and it is not an error in the drawing.

It does not describe what is inside the wall. Assemblies, insulation and structure live on the sections and details, which is one of the practical arguments for the detailed tier.

It does not settle colour. Elevations are line drawings with notes. If colour matters to you, that is a separate conversation and it is not what you are approving on this sheet.

A rendering is not an elevation either. A rendered image sells a feeling and a dimensioned elevation states facts. Both are useful. Only one of them gets built from, and only one goes to the code office.

Ask for the front and rear side by side at the same scale. It is the fastest way to catch a proportion that has drifted between the two.

One local note worth acting on. The substantial 19th-century houses along Main Street are ornate and expensive to do correctly, and their detail lives almost entirely on the elevation sheets. If your project touches one, spend your attention there rather than on the floor plan. Ask the City of Saco what they expect submitted for an older property before the set is finalised.

Who gets house plans in Saco, ME

Owners of Main Street's 19th-century houses planning work where the exterior detail is the point. People building new who want to understand what they are approving.

Owners of mill-era housing along the river adding on and needing the new face to hold together with the old.

What does the job cover here?

A full set including a drawn elevation for every face of the building, dimensioned for height, with roof pitch, opening marks, material callouts and the finished grade line shown.

On a Saco project touching an older house, add the trim and cornice callouts to that list explicitly. On these buildings the ornament is not decoration on top of the design.

It is the design.

When should you start drawings in Saco?

Early enough to sit with the elevations for a week rather than approve them in a meeting. That single habit prevents most of the regret in this trade.

For a summer build, that means autumn, with the elevations settled well before the permit goes in.

Why is Saco different?

Because more of the value of a house here is on its outside than in most of my towns. Main Street was built to be looked at, and the drawings that describe those buildings deserve more attention than the ones for a plain rectangle out of town.

A statewide fact for your comparisons: Maine does not license general contractors or builders, and only plumbers and electricians hold state licenses. Reading an elevation properly is one of the few checks a homeowner can perform without any credential at all, which is exactly why it is worth learning.

What do Saco homeowners ask about house plans?

What is an elevation drawing? One face of a building drawn flat and straight on, to scale, with heights dimensioned and openings, materials and trim called out.

How many elevations are in a plan set? Normally one for each side of the building, so four on a typical house.

How do I read the roof pitch on an elevation? It appears as a small triangle with two numbers, showing rise over run. It governs the shape of the whole roof.

Why does the drawing not look like a photo of the house? An elevation has no perspective, so nothing recedes. Buildings often read flatter and wider on the sheet than they do in person.

Permit-approved guarantee block. Renders from _guarantee-block.md.

Elevations come with both tiers. What the detailed tier adds is the sections and details that explain what the elevation only shows the surface of.

Use a revision on the elevations rather than saving it. Of everything in a plan set, the exterior is the part you cannot quietly change later, so it is the best possible use of a round that is already paid for.

And print them. An elevation read at full size on paper is a different experience from one read on a phone, and mistakes that are invisible on a screen are obvious across a kitchen table.