Engineered Drawings

The standard plans we provide to every paying customer are called generic blueprints. Given that our buildings are built in five-foot increments and the first five feet and the last five feet are identical, identical to one another, the standard plans are very simple and very non-complex.

Each customer will receive one set of generic drawings from 12 feet wide to 30 feet wide, and from six feet tall to 14 feet tall, You follow this diagram exactly whether the building will be 20 feet long or 200 feet long. You simply replicate the first five feet again and again and again and again until you get to the end of the actual building itself.

These generics label the wind, snow load, live load, dead loads, seismic parameters, and the nine yards a county’s inspection department will look for. In nearly all cases, our plans have been engineered to meet the highest wind load in the state and the highest snow load in the state.

There are exceptions when you’re in a high-wind or heavy snow area. In North Carolina, for example, where you have Asheville, NC in the snowy mountains and Wilmington, NC on the hurricane or riddle beach, that can be very tricky. However, our plans have been set up for one set of generic documents to cover both extremes. Now, in certain cases, for example, Brunswick County, North Carolina where they have the outer banks, additional sets of engineering have been brought in for the state of North Carolina to accommodate the wind loads in those two counties. In West Virginia, for example, which has a very easy wind and snow load throughout 90% of the state, a special high snow load set of plans have been prepared for Green County and Boone County, which experiences significantly higher snow load than the average West Virginia County.

There are examples like that that go in every single state. For example, Jackal Island in Georgia has a higher wind load than Atlanta. So in each state, one set of generics will cover 90% of our industry. However, in the cases where they do not cover are in situations where our generics do not cover the wind and snow loads. There are specific region plans that the engineer has prepared to allow for jackal island-type situations.

A raised seal plan takes the generic information and it removes the other 13 or 14 states that it’s applicable in from any place of record on the drawings. In other words, in Virginia, since they’re a commonwealth of Virginia, they don’t want to see North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, or Tennessee’s name on a set of blueprints going into their state.

The state of Virginia is notorious for asking for raised seal drawings. Now, “raised seal” is an outdated term that dates back to when they had embossed crimpers that they would use to verify. This was in my hand, says the engineer, because those crimps do not show up well on fax or email or any electronic transmission. They’ve not raised the seal anymore. A better description would be “seeing a stamp on every page”. So they’re using a stamp a much like a notary or, or something along those lines would use. And they’re simply putting that Virginia State Seal and his contractor’s license number for the state of Virginia on each and every page.

The other thing that the stamp on every page does is it alleviates any concern that the state may have that the consumer, the manufacturer, or the salesperson may have removed an unfavorable document and replaced it with one that was more favorable from a different state’s copy of the generic plans.

We are not aware of any particular situations where that has taken place but we fully see as though that could be a concern if you’re sitting on the side of the inspections department in a particular state, the raised seal or the stamp on each and every page does alleviate those concerns.

The third type of blueprints that we utilize in our industry are the rarest and the most expensive. They are referred to as Site-Specific Plans, which means the plans will be drawn by the engineer specifically for your address, your building, the placement of your doors and windows, and the code in your county.

Any restrictive setbacks or restrictive covenants that an HOA, county, or country club, whatever the case may be, may have enacted for your area.

For example, my house out in the county does not have the same stipulations that a house built in a “Golfing Country Club Development” due to the fact, as we’re out in the country, no one’s worried about having that curb appeal to help increase the property values. Whereas over in the country club, they are absolutely concerned with that and do a very thorough job of enforcing, not allowing a customer to put something in their yard that may negatively affect their surrounding neighbors or the community in general.

Site-specific plans can vary greatly in cost based on how complex your building may be, how simple it may be, how complex the rules in your HOA may be, or how many underground utilities the inspector will have to figure out for you.

One example would be if your home was a restored home that was built in the mid-1850s and the septic tank is not clearly defined on the original plat filed with the county. The inspector has to figure out where that septic tank is. That costs time, money, and effort, as he researches it from a desk in his office.

Site-Specific Plans are extremely hard to predict the cost of because we never know what the engineer is going run into. In the process of preparing your plans to prepare a set of site-specific plans for a particular individual, the engineer has to become an expert on your state, your city, your township, your municipality, your community, your HOA, and your exact property, which means anything that you may have done to the property must be taken into consideration where power lines are located, city utilities, fiber optic cables, your neighbor’s driveway, water runoff where the water in your neighborhood is currently running, can you put your building where you want it to be or does the, the three properties to the north of you, all of their water runoff come through your backyard right where you intended that building to be.

If that’s the case, then the engineer may have to come up with a water mitigation plan to satisfy the county because, the plat or the information that the county keeps on hand will indicate to the county that your backyard happens to be the runoff for, uh, five or six houses in the area. So many of these things have to be taken into consideration, a lot of which do not meet the eye of the homeowner, the salesperson, or even the manufacturer, which is why the state entrusts this responsibility only to licensed engineers who hold an active and valid license in that state.

Additionally, certain counties or states will operate based on an international building code year model, for example, in 2018. Meanwhile, others will preemptively adopt a newer version such as 2021 when every other state or county surrounding it may still be operating off the code book.

Many times this operating code will change at will, and there is no legal stipulation or guideline that says the county or state must make anyone aware once they adopt these new policies. So unfortunately it’s not a proactive change where we get ahead of the curve, they change it, and they notify us of the change as they’re denying us building permits. Then we inquire why, and they say, oh, last Tuesday at the board meeting, we decided to govern everything off 2021 plans, not the 2018s you have submitted to me. We can ask the question, will the entire state of South Carolina, including Columbia, currently use 2018? Well, Greer County decided Tuesday at the meeting to use 2020 ones.

Then we have to reach back out to the engineer. He has to prepare a new set based on the new guidelines. In most situations, nothing changes from one state or year to the next. The information just has to be updated and a new set of plans has to be purchased from the engineer. This happens quite a bit in our industry; unfortunately, there is no sign that the state governments intend to make this a more organized system anytime soon.