Rant: The one comment that made me rethink my whole dimensioning approach

I was laying out a complex roof frame for a custom house out in Oakwood and an older engineer looked over my shoulder. He just said "you're giving me numbers I can't use because you're measuring from the wrong face." I always drew from the center of the beam but he wanted me to reference the outer face so the framers didn't have to do mental math on site. Has anyone else had a simple feedback like that totally flip your drafting habits?

2 comments

2 Comments

christopher_sullivan1mo ago

Wait, so you were dimensioning from the center line the whole time? That makes so much more sense now why my framers would always give me that look. I swear I never even thought about the outer face until I saw a guy literally draw a little arrow pointing at the side of a beam on a set of plans.

hill.andrew1mo ago

Three inches. That's the gap I see every time a new homeowner puts a refrigerator in a spot that clearly wasn't meant for it, because they measured from the wall instead of from the cabinet face. @christopher_sullivan, you're onto something bigger here. People naturally want to measure from the easy, obvious starting point like a centerline or a wall, but reality is always built off the outer edges. It's the same reason why someone will hang a picture frame centered between two windows but ignore the sixteen inches of empty wall on the left side of the room. We all pick the convenient reference point instead of the one that actually matters, and then wonder why nothing quite lines up. Is that just how our brains work, or do we just never get taught to look at the full picture first?