Apologies for the lack of posts over the last few weeks. Things have been moving forward quickly. We are all about the details now, tile setouts, lighting, door hardware, paver patterns, screen details, carpet selection, cornice resolution and so it goes.

We often discuss here in the office to what level we should go to when documenting. In my experience, you can never really over document, and no matter how far you go there will always be something you don’t describe that needs to be resolved on site.

As each project has a budget (including a consultancy budget), it is not feasible to continue to document forever and a day and produce tens of tens of drawings. In our experience however, it is important to understand at what point in the process you document and what purpose the documentation has.

For example, last week we documented (during the build phase) tile setout drawings for the ensuite nominating where tile joints should be, how wall and floor tiles relate to each other and where the starting setout point for the tile feature wall in the room should begin.

This is only being done now for the main reason that, as we often find, the room as built is not exactly the size of the room when documented. We are only talking about 10-20mm here and there, but when setting out tiles this is significant. In other words, any tile setout drawing done at the time of tender would have been a waste of time because the dimensions we were designing to would have been wrong, and subsequently a waste of the clients money for us to do at that time.

In summary, understand when it is the right time to document based on the information available and the detail required at the time. In a case like the above the costs could be determined at tender as the tiles were known as were the details required. Setout has no effect on costs so holding back documenting to this level of detail made sense.

Image above of tiles being laid in the upstairs ensuite.