Paper Drawings

I'm sitting outside on my backyard patio in my shirtsleeves, drinking a beer, listening to some tunes and just generally enjoying life when my wife appears bearing a sheaf of house plans. We've been on a tear, well, she's been on a tear and I am a willing accomplice, so what's to be done with these plans? Well, they're all plans for the house we spent three years remodeling in Portland. We sold that house in January and we have been trying to purge it from our lives, so we probably ought to just throw them in the recycling bin. I mean, a lot of good paper there. You know, the high quality shit, not that effin newsprint. On the other hand we did spend three frickin' years on that project, so maybe we ought to take look, see if there is anything spectacular in there that might be worth saving. So I spend a couple of minutes paging through them, they're big, D size sheets, two minutes longer than my wife thought they were worth. So I page through them while she stands there fuming.

The paper is being difficult, the sheets won't separate. My fingers are too dry and they just slip on the paper, but I persist (in spite of the steam) and I eventually get through them. Of the two dozen sheets I save three B-size floor plans. During the three years we spent on this project we probably went through a couple hundred sheets of D-size plans, and a similar number of C and B-size drawings. All these plans cost money, some I ordered from Office Depot and some came from design firms. Some came from microfilm. The city used to collect actual paper plans, but a long while ago they started microfilming the plans. Probably mounted the microfilm in IBM cards. The next step was to run them through an automatic scanner and upload a digital version of the image into the great cloud of network servers in the sky. So when I came around and wanted the original plans, I got digital images from the city and sent them to Office Depot.

Used to be there were multiple grades of paper. Things like blueprints didn't get very hi-grade paper, after all they didn't need to last very long. But now you want a print of a digital image, Office Depot will do it for you, but the base grade of paper is like premium paper from before the digital revolution. Now-a-days, printing serves a different purpose than it did before. Anybody can print anything now, but the base service is like what premium service used to be for high volume shops.

I read a story some time ago and someone in the story mentions that he spent the war (WW2 in the UK) at a drafting table, drawing the same bracket over and over again. I was thinking he should have gotten a template printed up that included all the parts of the bracket that weren't subject to change. But then you look at the setup charge, and how big a print run do you want to make? Cheaper by far to just have him draw the whole thing over again. They probably already have a template that included the border and the title box, so that didn't have to be drawn.