Discover how to create a professional meets and bounds drawing with the right units, layers, and property line elements. Learn how to handle common issues that arise when dealing with provided data files and how to properly configure the drawing's format, such as setting units to decimal and using Surveyor's units for angles.
Key Insights
- The creation of a meets and bounds drawing involves setting up proper units, layers, and property line elements. This process is typically carried out by civil engineers and includes information such as streets, curbs, center lines, and sometimes underground utilities.
- It's crucial to understand that data files provided by surveyors may not always follow a logical order based on the point of beginning. It's a common real-world application that one may encounter segments in unexpected directions.
- When preparing the drawing, one should configure the units to decimal, with one decimal unit representing a foot. The precision should be set as two hundredths of a foot, using Surveyor's units for angles. Adjusting the layer settings is also part of this setup process.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
There are three PDFs in this lesson, and I'm hoping you've had the chance to print them out. They can best be viewed if you look at them on 11 × 17 sheets of paper. The first one I'd like to look at is the Meet 01 PDF.
At the bottom, I have the north arrow, so this heavier part that's down here is showing which way is north. And I have my point of beginning. Now, you'll notice that this drawing is a little bit more complicated than the ones we went over in our overview, in that we're showing straight lines, and we also have some curves going on.
So here is my point of beginning. You can see that this property line segment over here is 116.11 feet, and it's going north 51 degrees towards east. This segment here goes north 38 degrees towards west.
There's a small segment down here that's going north so many degrees towards east. We then have the curve, and then we have this segment down here. Now, you'll also notice that some of these meets and bounds don't quite feel right.
And by that, what I mean in particular is this one. Because you can see this segment here is going north towards west, this one says north towards east, which would mean that the segment logically would be going over here to the right. I've purposely put this in here for you because we will find on occasion that when people give you data files, that the people who have completed the surveying, rather than following a point of beginning around in a logical order, will frequently start and give you a segment in another direction.
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So again, this is a real-world application that we will really run into. We're showing the site plan like this. Now, what I've done on this next presentation, and we'll be getting into the technicalities of what we've done, is this is showing a view like we will end up seeing after we've created a new user coordinate system, where we're showing that the north arrow is going here towards the left, but we have oriented the presentation so it looks logical on our sheet.
And here is our VDCI AS architectural site plan 1.0 file. You can see that we have the site, we have the house, we've aligned the house so that the front of the garage lines up with the front of the curb that's down here, and then we've also positioned two corners of the house relative to the site. Let's begin by opening a new drawing.
So I will go up to File, Open, and I'd like to open my CAD 302 start site file. Let's go look at the layers. You can see that in the layers, the layer names have the prefix of C for civil, and then I have my annotative layers, annotation-dims, symbols, text.
I have a layer for curbs, a civil no plot. This is an outline that we will end up using to go around the building, a property line, property setback line, and the street center line. You'll also notice that under the line types, I've created a line type for you, which is the property line type, which is very similar to the phantom line type, it's just the spacing is slightly different, and we've also assigned dash to, center to, and hidden to some of the different layers.
So what I'd like to do is let's make the C-property layer our current layer. What we're working on is a meets and bounds drawing. These drawings typically contain property lines, property setbacks, information such as streets and curbs, center lines to the roads, and sometimes you will even see infrastructure information in that, and by infrastructure I mean the locations of sewers, underground utilities, and so on and so forth.
The meets and bounds drawings are typically not designed or created by the architect or residential designer. They are usually provided to you by a civil engineer. So even though we're going to be creating our own meets and bounds drawing, we will be working as if we were a civil engineering firm creating this meets and bounds drawing.
The first thing I'd like to do is to go File, Save As, and let's save the drawing with the name CAD302 Meet. So this is going to be our CAD302 Meets and Bounds drawing itself. So I'm going to choose Save, and here we are, and I'm going to overwrite the file.
Let's go to Layers, and the layer that I want to be using as my current layer will be my civil property line layer. So C-Property is going to be my current layer. I've mentioned this before, but civil engineers use a different kind of units than we do when we're doing houses and buildings and so on and so forth.
They tend to use decimal units where one decimal unit represents a foot, whereas for us, one architectural unit represents an inch. So let's begin by properly configuring our units. So I'm going to go Format, I'm going to go down to Units.
We began this Meets and Bounds drawing by starting off with a copy of our start file. In the start file, I had already gone up to Format and down to Units, and I had set our units as being decimal, and again the civil engineer will let one decimal unit represent a foot. I have specified the precision as being two hundredths of a foot.
I'm using Surveyor's units, and the angles will be using Northing's. Now that we know that our drawing is properly prepared, we have the right units, we have the proper layers, let's begin in the next video working to put our property lines in the drawing.
