Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
In this video we will discuss how to draw up your site plan. Hopefully you have already
watched the videos about how to measure a site and the real basics of drawing
a site plan.
This video builds on the content of those videos,
so if you haven't watched them yet
it is a good idea to watch them first. This video takes you through the process of
drawing up formal site planning documents for this project,
now that you have measured and recorded the dimensions of the section, buildings and other key features.
We will draw a site plan and an environmental plan.
The first thing to do
is work out the scale at which you will draw the site plan.
Before we can do this, we need to understand how scale works.
Here is our section as if we were looking down on it from a helicopter.
And here is our piece of paper.
If we drew everything on the section at full scale on our paper
something that measured one hundred millimeters on the section
would be drawn as a 100mm long line
on the paper.
This is a scale of 1:1,
or full scale.
As you can probably imagine,
this would take a lot of paper to draw the whole section.
A better way of doing this is to say that 1mm on the page
represents a longer length in the real world, for example 100mm.
This is then a scale of 1:100. To work out what scale to use for your
site plan,
take the length and width of your section
and divide these by the size of the paper you are going to use.
For this example we are going to draw the plan on a piece of A3 paper.
A3 paper is 420mm by 297mm.
The section we are using in this example
is 40.315 metres long
or 40315mm.
It is 22.3 metres wide
or 22300mm.
You need to keep the units of measure the same when doing this calculation so
we will use mm. If we divide the length of the section by the length of the piece of paper
we get 95.988. In other words, if we used a scale of 1:96,
it would just fit on the piece of paper,
lengthwise.
If we do the same thing for
the section and paper width
we get a scale of 1:75.
If we drew the whole section onto our piece of paper at a scale of 1:75,
the section would fit width-wise,
but would extend off the page in the lengthwise dimension.
For this reason you should always use the bigger number when choosing what scale
to draw your site plan at.
Site plans should be drawn at a standard scale
usually 1:100 or 1:200.
Using our example section,
if we drew it at a scale of 1:100,
the drawn size of the section would be 403mm
by 223mm.
This would mean that there is only 17mm (or 1.7cm)
of space between the drawing
and the edge of the paper,
probably about 8mm on either side.
Because we still need to draw things like labels and site dimensions,
it is a better idea to draw this site at a scale of 1:200.
Now that we have determined the scale we are going to use,
we can draw the section, buildings and other key features onto our piece of paper.
Next we draw on our key measurements.
You will recall from the video on measuring a section,
that it is a good idea to measure from each point
to several other points.
In this example we were able to confirm that the site was rectangular by checking the surveyor's plan
on the Certificate of Title.
We did use multiple measurements to check that the house was located on the section parallel
to the site boundaries.
The last thing to do is add notes about the key features of the site, such as
buildings, existing garden areas, large trees and shrubs and hard-surface areas.
Your site plan is now completed.
The next step is to create an environmental plan,
which records all of the environmental information about the site,
such as dry spots,
wet spots, sunny areas,
shady areas
and changes in ground level. Other resources in this topic
teach you about how to research and measure
this environmental information,
but this video shows you how to draw it up.
To do this,
we recommend that you place a sheet of tracing paper
or butter paper over your site plan
and tape both pieces of paper to your drawing surface.
This will prevent them from moving while you draw your environmental plan.
For clarity
we will remove the notes and measurements from our site plan. The first thing we are going to add
is contour information.
Contour lines show changes in height.
For this project it is not essential that the contour lines are highly accurate,
instead we suggest you simply draw lines on your environmental plan
where the ground level changes height.
After doing this simply note how steep each part is.
Next we will add the location of the dry and wet spots on this site
as these often relate to the site contours.
Then we will add the location of those parts of the section that don't get at least six hours
of sun each day,
in this example we will use loose cross hatching.
We got this information from our sun study.
Finally we will note the direction that the wind comes from most of the time.
This is called the prevailing wind.
We have now completed the two key drawings that we need to begin planning out
the location of our garden beds.
Thank you for watching this video.