In this article, the author outlines how to draft a site plan, touching on the necessary elements such as the property outline, distance from property lines, and the inclusion of a fuel modification zone. The piece also delves into the importance of precision enabled by Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and the role of site plans in meeting regulatory requirements.
Key Insights
- The article highlights the importance of including specific elements in a site plan such as the property outline, distance from property lines, and special zoning requirements like a fuel modification zone.
- The author emphasizes the role of CAD in ensuring precision in the drafting process, which may not be fully achievable in field measurements. For instance, the distance from the property line to the house could be 54 feet in the field while CAD may give a more precise measure of 53 feet, 11 1/2 inches.
- The article underscores the relevance of site plans in satisfying regulatory requirements. Elements such as fire notes, project description, assessor parcel number, project scope, and professional team involved are usually provided to the planning and land use department as part of the site plan.
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You can see that I have the house that is shaded in a gray. There is an existing driveway that goes from the road. So here's the road down here.
I have a driveway that comes up to the house. I have noted it as an existing dirt road. And I get up to the house and there it is.
You can see that I'm showing some dimensions right here that are showing the distance from the corner of the house to the property line. So from this top left corner of the house perpendicular, which means at a 90-degree angle to the property line, it's 53 feet, 11 1⁄2 inches. Now, again, this is CAD.
In reality, it might be 54 feet, but CAD can be a lot more accurate than we can normally do just out there in the field. But I'm showing that the house is about 54 feet from this property line here, and it's 182 feet from this property line here. And the important thing is for the county to understand that the house is definitely set in within the appropriate setback areas.
So I have the house. I have the distance from the property line. This is information that is normally included on the site plan.
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And for this project, I'm also showing a fuel modification zone. You may remember, but when we were talking about the fire requirements a few minutes ago, there were the fire notes. And the fire notes included the comments that we had to maintain dead and vegetative density within a fuel modification zone around the house.
So what we're showing here is that the fuel modification zone, which is required to be 100 feet outside of the house, that we're showing where the fuel modification zone is on the site plan. So, again, we have the house. We have the distance from the property line.
We're showing the fuel modification zone. So here we are with our TS 1.0 sheet, where this, again, is our title sheet. We have the name of the title sheet in the bottom right.
We have a description of what the sheet is about. We would normally have the project name and the owner's name over here, the architectural stamps here. I have my project number, who drew the project, who checked the project, and also revision dates.
As we get into the project, we'll be covering more about revision dates. I have the sheet index. Again, this is required to be on the cover sheet or the title sheet.
Same names for pretty much the same thing. I have my sheet index listing all of the sheets that are included within the set. I have my development summary.
Again, I'm typically talking to the planning and land use department at this point in the process, where I'm saying, here's the project, here's where it is, here's the assessor parcel number, here's the neighborhood it's in, here's the zoning for the neighborhood, here's how large the project is, and then I have my scope of work, the professional team that's involved in the project. I have fire notes and general notes. Again, these notes typically come to you from your appropriate regulatory agency.
I have a vicinity map. You see beside vicinity map, it says NTS. This simply means not to scale.
So what we've done is we've gone online, we've captured an image of the neighborhood, and we've presented it up here, and we have our site plan right down here. I also have some notes up here that are called keynotes, and you can see I have a keynote one that's saying proposed two-story house with basement, keynote two, existing location of leach field. If I look on the drawing itself, you'll see that I have my keynotes for existing house, and the leach field is here.
And again, we will see more specifics about that in a couple of minutes. So again, here's title sheet number one. I'd like you to spend some time reviewing this, and then we'll go on to our next page.
