Archive for category: Blog

The whole brief: one presentation sheet with two renders, a few views and a list of notes.

Every few weeks a client asks us some version of the same question: can’t AI just do this now? So we stopped guessing and tested it. One of our drafters took real jobs from our queue and ran them through ChatGPT and Astra, an AI assistant that promises CAD output, then compared what came back with the sheets we actually sent to the client.

Short version: on a millwork shop drawing, the kind a shop builds from, AI saved us zero hours. It drew a desk that looked roughly right and was wrong in every way that matters to a fabricator. It did help on a few small, flat tasks, and we’ll get to those too.

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An exterior elevation from a CD set. Level marks run down both sides, grid bubbles along the bottom.

Construction documents are the drawing set and the specs a contractor uses to price a building, get it permitted and then build it. In the usual sequence they come third, after schematic design and design development, and they’re the first package anyone can actually bid on.

Up to this point the team has been deciding what the building is. Now they have to explain how to put it together, and that’s why the sheet count goes up so fast. Each wall needs a type. Each door needs a number. And anything tricky gets cut in section at a scale the framer can read without squinting.

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Sixteen details from one job. Bottom right: the note that settles a hundred arguments later, 1/8 inch maximum at all openings.

Hardware looks like a detail you sort out at the end. It is not. Pick a different hinge and the door size changes. Pick undermount slides instead of side mount and the box gets narrower. Decide on inset doors after the elevations are drawn and every opening on the sheet is wrong.

That is why hardware sits early in a millwork set, and why it lives in two places at once: a schedule that names the products, and details that show what those products do to the geometry.

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The output of a CAD to BIM job: the same building the DWGs described, rebuilt as objects that know what they are.

CAD to BIM means taking a set of 2D drawings and rebuilding the project as a model where every wall knows it is a wall. Not tracing lines in Revit. Rebuilding.

That distinction is the whole job. In DWG a wall is two parallel lines and a hatch. Move one line and nothing else reacts. In a model the wall is an object with a type, a thickness, a fire rating and a host of things attached to it. Move it and the plan, the elevations, the sections and the schedules all catch up on their own.

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The key plan fixes which wall is which. Without it two elevations meet in a corner and fight over the same inches.

A closet looks like the simplest thing in a millwork package. It is a box with a rod in it. Then the shop asks how high the countertop sits, whether the rod is one and a quarter or one and three eighths, and what happens where the run meets the return wall. Those answers live on the shop drawings, and if they are not there the shop guesses.

We draw closets every week as part of millwork shop drawing services, so what follows is what actually goes on the sheets, using pages from real packages.

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