There are rigorous steps involved in submitting and obtaining approval for drawings in South Africa. These steps are then followed by various inspections and finally building approval and an occupancy certificate is issued. In this post, I only cover what is required in the set of drawings.

When building in South Africa, one must submit a set of plans for approval to the local municipality to be assessed and approved (in our case, to the Gansbaai building control office). The submission must comprise of two sets of drawings printed on either A2 or A1 and a very long form (Form 2) filled out by the SACAP registered professionals that you are working with such as the engineer or architect.

The drawing set should include two copies of the following drawings: a site plan, plans, elevations, sections, electrical layout, door and window schedule, glazing schedule. The site plan must show an area schedule and a table with the XA Calculations. There should also be two print outs of the geographical survey. All the drawings must be coloured correctly and everything must be labeled to comply with the SABS SANS 10400.

The Site Plan

The site plan is a road map for the rest of the drawings to follow. It shows the proposed buildings in relation to the property, the elements (such as sun orientation and placement on a slope) and the surroundings. There are certain conventions and required pieces of information that must be shown but it is better to include as much detail as possible.

The required items are as follows:

• A compass within north pointing up – the drawing must be oriented so that due north is at the top of the page
• The beacons on all corners as per the Title Deed – these will usually have coordinates but the drawing obtained from the geographical survey will include this information
• The contours which are obtained from the geographical survey
• The erf number and the erf numbers of the properties surrounding
• The boundary and a title to show what that line is
• The dimensions of the whole site. Again, these should match the Title Deed
• The building line. This changes from place to place.
• The buildings must be indicated as ‘massing‘ with a title for each part – go to this post to see the drawing conventions.
• The High Natural Ground Level point (HNGL) and Low Natural Ground Level point (LNGL) which should be indicated on the envelope of each proposed building – the exact figures can be obtained from the surveyor
• The fall of the water off the roof, its path from there and the exit from the property must be indicated
• All gulley’s, soil pipes (in brown dashed line), rodding eyes and inspection eyes. The soil pipe must carry a note explaining the fall and where it exits
• The point of vehicular access
• The name and distances to the intersections with the closest streets (from site boundary)
• The name of the road adjacent to the property

The area schedule must also be included on the site plan. This is split into existing structures and proposed structures. Those two categories are further split into the footprint which is under cover on ground level and the upper levels. The values for ground floor areas are then added and a percentage of the whole property is given. This percentage should not exceed to the total allowance for your property which can be found on the Land Use Zoning Scheme.

New legislation requires that buildings be responsive to the environment and take measures to reduce thermal loads in buildings and reduce energy use. The assessment of these efforts in a design are called the XA Calculations and are worked out by a trained registered professional such as an architect who will sometimes use sophisticated software to generate the result. A table with these calculations must also be present on the site plan.

Usually the site plan is presented at a larger scale, upward of 1:200 and depends on the size of the land and scope of the project. If the project is complex then an SDP (Site Development Plan) may be required. There are other notes that must be included on site plan drawing, but I cover that in this post about notes.

The Floor Plans

With these drawings one starts to zoom in on the detail of the building. The drawings can become very dense with information, notes, colours and textures. It is essential to lay the drawing out in as clear and legible way as possible so that it can be read with ease by the various sections of the building control office.

The building control officers are aiming to get an understanding of the water use, electricity use, occupancy, material choice, light penetration, air ventilation, waste disposal, storm water drainage, structure and safety of the building. The drawing should also serve as an instruction for the construction or alteration of the building if needs be, although one typically prepares more simplified drawings for use in the construction process.

If one thinks of the building in layers similar to a body and the drawing like an anatomical illustration, then one builds up from the skeleton which in the case of a building is the structure. The walls or timber or steel structure is drawn first, followed by openings, then utilities and amenities such as kitchens, bathrooms, fireplaces, etc. Laid over this basic drawing are the dotted lines indicating things which are not visible at a waist high slice through the building, followed by hatches, colours, dimensions, services (such as plumbed gas and waste pipes) and notes.

Conventionally the building is oriented parallel/perpendicular to the sheet of paper with the north symbol tilted to orient correctly.

Each individual drawing on the sheet is numbered and labeled.

The scale that the drawing is printed at must be given below the title of the drawing.

Every single opening, room length, wall width, passage, overhang and protrusion must be given a dimension. There should be no element where someone is left guessing how big it is. It is also common practice to give overall dimensions of whole parts of buildings and then also of the entire building itself.

Each room must be labeled for its intended purpose, with the floor material written below. Every window or door must be labeled with a ‘type’ number and be given an individual number for identifying when compiling the glazing schedule.

The position of utilities such as gas heaters, gas cylinders, water tanks, etc must be shown.

Items that will receive water and have waste dispelled from in bathroom and kitchen layouts must be drawn and labeled. Waste pipes (everything before the gulley) must be shown in dashed green lines and soil pipes (everything after the gulley) should be shown in a brown dashed line.

There should be a roof plan included with the drawings and it must indicate the direction in which the water will fall and what will happen to that water after discharging from the roof.

External features such as verandahs, pergolas, balconies, shading devices, etc must be drawn and labeled.

You must show the highest and lowest points where your building envelope touches the ground, these can be obtained by sending the final site plan to your geomatics company before submitting your drawings.

The Elevations

Elevations show the scale and materiality of the building, lending character to your plan and setting the aesthetic. If you use the illustrations made for the window and door schedule (see below), then the result will quite accurately reflect what the building will look like once built. Again, the more detail that is included, the more likely you are to receive approval and the more likely your building will look the way you want it to look.

One of the most essential things to illustrate is the high and low points where the building touches the natural ground level (NGL). These points must be drawn across all of the elevations. The median (half way between the two) must also be drawn in. This median line is known as the baseline. The baseline is used to determine the height restriction point of your building which can be found in the Zoning Scheme (in our case it was 8m). Another line must be off-set from the baseline as per this height limit (eg 8m) and then your building should not exceed this.

On the elevation that shows the gradient (in our case it was the two short elevations – North West and South East) the middle point of the building must have a line drawn through it, connecting the baseline to the height limit line. The points of interception must be marked using an inverted triangle.

The other types of lines that should be shown on the façade in a dashed line style are the finished floor level (FFL) of each storey and the wall plate – a strip of timber placed on the last course of bricks which the roof rests on. If a staircase is adjacent to an exterior wall, its profile should be shown in a dashed line.

All sanitary fixtures must be labeled at the their relative height on the elevation to which they are closest. The same rule that applies on the plans is used on the elevations: everything before the gulley is indicated in green and everything after it is indicated in brown. The angle of which the effluent moves away from the house must be shown – the optimal ratio being 1:60 (i.e for every distance of 60m there must be a drop of 1m).

All the materials must be drawn or hatched to reflect how they look in reality. They must also be coloured according to the required conventions. Details such as weep holes in plastered masonry cavity walls, fencing material, gutters, chimney flues and solar panels should be included.

The only dimensions given on an elevation is the angle of the roof pitch. It is shown with an open beak-like line and an angle segment with the dimension given in degrees.

Like the plans, each drawing must be numbered, labeled and the final print scale given.

The Sections

The structure and construction method is expressed in the sections of a building. There should be at least one section through each part the building or in every area that has a different height or building method. There should also be at least one section in each orthogonal axis through the building (i.e. one long section and one short one or two sections perpendicular to each other). To best explain a building with multiple levels, there should also be a section cutting through the staircase or cutting through an area close to the stairs so that the profile can be shown in a dotted line.

The floor to ceiling heights of each space that is cut through, must be indicated. These should conform to the National Building Regulations but in short: a passage or circulation area can be as low as 2.1m (the height of a standard door) but this is a very uncomfortable height. Habitable rooms (bedrooms, living rooms, etc) must be a minimum of 2.4m high and even that is quite tight. An excellent rule of thumb is to measure the height from the tips of your fingers to your toes when you have your arm stretched out as far above you as possible – use this measurement to set the ceiling height that is most comfortable for you (this is partly why we didn’t build with containers). We have set the rooms in the bedroom wing at 2.6m (finished floor level to underside ceiling) and in the living area we have a lofty 4.6m high apex. Be as generous in your proportioning as you can afford to be, this is likely going to be your home for a long time and you would regret it if it felt cramped.

As mentioned, the structure must be shown. This is focused on the layers of the various floors, the make-up of the various roofs, the construction of the walls and how openings for doors and windows are dealt with. Part of illustrating the structure is showing how water is dispelled, for example show the gutter that the rain falls into once off the roof or if a window is cut through indicate the weather sill and annotate the DPM (damp proof membrane). On the ground floor slab, show the layers of compacted earth, levelled sand, insulation (such as Styrofoam) and again indicate the DPM. All the cast concrete elements should be shown with the correct dimensions at the correct depths.

Where the earth is cut through, the cut line should be very thick and the area hatched with a basket weave. If earth is being retained, then the condition of the soil and water behind the wall must be shown with an engineered retaining wall and agricultural drain (see the images below). In our case, the cut was gradual so we are simply dressing it with stone. Under the stone will be an agricultural drain that releases the ground water into the leiwater channel behind the house. An alternative detail is where water is released from this drain every few meters through a smaller dimensioned pipe.

Every wall, window, door, foundation, truss, etc must be labeled in detail. The various required notes are explained here and the colours are explained here.

Again, each drawing on the page must be numbered, labeled and the final print scale given.

See this article on 7 Common French Drain Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

The Electrical Layout

This is one of the most fussy and layered drawings in the set. How you choose to express all the information is up to you, so long as it’s easy to understand and clearly drawn. I found it best to draw both the electrical outlets and the light source points on the same drawing because I think they go hand-in-hand but the two systems can be separated out. I did, however, submit the lower and upper floors on two different sheets of paper and printed the drawings at a scale of 1:50 to give the details some space to breath. To keep the drawing clear, I removed all colours and extra hatches except for the walls.

These drawings reference a legend on the page which shows every type of light, outlet and element that uses electricity – regardless of whether or not you have it in the building. If you don’t have an icon on your legend for an item you will be using, you can make one up – as long as it corresponds to what is on your drawing (see my LED strips for example). Every outlet type (plug point) must be indicated along with the height at which it is situated in the wall or floor. Each light fixture must show the wattage that it draws (these are tallied to form part of the XA calculations). Waterproof and water resistant icons differ from regular use icons so be aware of outdoor vs indoor fixtures.

I suggest plotting the whole lot out before drawing it up. Think about your lifestyle and how you prefer things to be. Think about what has annoyed you in other houses. It’s your house and as long as you conform to safety regulations and work with a registered professional when installing your electrics, you must place your lights and points as you see fit. An example is having a plug point above counter or desk height – it’s not typically specified that way, but I prefer it.

As with the other drawings, each drawing must be numbered, labeled and the final print scale given.

The Door & Window Schedule

In fact, this drawing should be drawn first and used as reference material for the elevations later on. Life doesn’t always work that way though. Sometimes you only work out what kind of window you will have much later in the process, once most of the façade has already been resolved. In our case, a challenge came in that we are only using reclaimed doors and windows. We had to kind of thumb suck what we hoped to find. Fortunately our planning approval process was so drawn out that we managed to find every single door and window in second hand building yards or on Gumtree by the time we submitted the final approval set.

The important things to show are the materials of the doors and windows, the direction of the opening (shown with a dashed line drawn diagonally across the opening with the hinges being on the long side of the triangle), the type of glazing (or put a note to refer to the glazing schedule) and the heights and sizes. Each type of door or window is given its own reference number and these are used on the plan to correspond to this drawing. The aim is for the building inspector to see that the openings conform to the allowances in the National Building Regulations (such as ventilation and illumination) and that the sizes of the openings and glazing types don’t make that the building exceeds the XA parameters for energy efficiency in both summer and winter.

The Glazing Schedule

In the glazing schedule, a number is given against every opening with a corresponding list stating what kind of glass is used in that situation – whether it is safety glass, laminate glass, high performance glass, double glazing, etc. The thicknesses of the glass is also given. This is then used to determine the safety of the use of that glass, for example glass in a bathroom has to be a minimum of 6mm to avoid smashing if falling against. In addition to this, these various glass types are used in the XA calculations.

Summary

The information submitted to the building control office is dense, complex and comprehensive. Don’t get overwhelmed, take it step by step and simplify things where you can. When preparing your drawings, keep in mind that many different departments will be looking at those drawings for various reasons. Try to give more information than less. Don’t be vague if you can be specific. This is a legal document and the responsibility is not only on the architect or the engineer to make sure your building is safe and well planned but it is also on you. The more clarity you have on your own ideas, the better and more succinctly you can convey them to the building control office, making it more likely to receive your approval.

For reference the drawing list is as follows:

1. Form 2
2. Geological Survey
3. Site Plan
4. Plan(s)
5. Elevations
6. Sections
7. Electrical Layout
8. Door & Window Schedule
9. Glazing Schedule

Don’t forget to print two sets of drawings.

If you want to ask me any questions or want me to look over your drawings or assist with the design, or help you find a professional to assist you with your drawings, don’t hesitate to contact me, info@ownerbuilderinsouthafrica.co.za

Note: refer to this post to see everything about notes and this one to see everything about colours. This post tells you all about the geological survey.

The South African Home Inspection Academy has this quite a useful summary document online.