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.

In these months of preparing the plans for submission, I found it very difficult to get all the Informaton I needed to draft the drawings correctly with the right colours and hatching. Even though we worked with an architect to submit the plans, the information I needed to complete the set of drawings and get them 100% correct was difficult to find. In another post I explain why it is that I and not the architect himself did the drafting; over here, I explain what is required in the set of drawings when submitting to council. However, in this article, I explain the conventions and reasons for various colours, hatches, and line types required on any set of building plans in South Africa.