Drafting Services Blog

An elevation drawing shows one face of a building, or one wall of a room, straight on and flat. Nothing shrinks into the distance the way it would in a perspective, which is exactly why you can lay a scale rule on the sheet and read a height straight off it. A plan answers where. An elevation answers how high, and what the face looks like to someone standing in front of it.

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Ask a cabinet shop what slows production down and the answer is rarely the CNC. It is the drawing package. A designer’s pretty elevation with no sections, a plan that pretends the wall is straight, a hardware note that says soft close hinges and nothing else. Cabinet shop drawings exist to remove that guesswork before a single panel gets cut. Below is what a proper cabinet set includes, how face frame and frameless construction change the sheets, and one real drawing from our team with the details a shop actually reads.

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Pick the scale you are plotting at and this page gives you the scale factor, the model space text height, the viewport zoom value and the dimension setting that goes with it. Architectural, engineering and metric scales are all covered, and every table below says where its numbers come from.

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Millwork is one of those words everyone on a project uses and almost nobody defines the same way. An architect means one thing by it. A carpenter means another. The client usually means her kitchen. No wonder briefs and quotes end up talking past each other.

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As-built drawings show a building the way it was actually constructed, not the way it was designed on paper. The two rarely match. During construction, contractors move outlets, shift walls by a few inches, reroute pipes around unexpected obstacles, and swap materials. Every change makes the original plans a little less accurate. As-built drawings capture the final state of the building with all these field changes included.

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