Got a call from a client in Tampa last month who wanted a full set of as-built drawings from a 1980s building, but the original blueprints were basically just coffee stains on vellum.

4 comments

4 Comments

Yeah, we hit that exact wall on a 90s strip mall retrofit. The permit drawings were basically just shadows on paper. We got a student intern with a good camera to take HUNDREDS of overlapping photos, way more than you'd think you need. Then we ran them through some photogrammetry software. It built a decent 3D model we could pull measurements from. Still had to verify the big stuff on site, but it saved us from having to measure every single stud and conduit by hand. Client was happy because it was fast and didn't cost a fortune.

harper9142mo ago

Oh man, my last attempt at reading one of those just turned into a very sad game of connect the dots.

margaretramirez1mo ago

Laser scanning is the way to go for anything that faded, just make sure you budget for verifying the weird corners the scanner might miss on site.

ben_lewis2mo ago

My old firm in Atlanta had a whole storage room of those vellum ghosts. You'd unroll them and half the dimensions had just faded into a light brown haze. We ended up laser scanning the whole place, which felt like cheating but saved probably two hundred hours of guesswork. The final drawings had more "assumed" notes than I was comfortable with, but the client signed off. That era of records is just a race against time before they turn to dust.