With our architectural drawings service, we take over the drafting work and nothing more. Our job is drafting and modelling, not engineering. So you will not get calculations from us, no structural advice and no planning permission process. That boundary is a deliberate choice, because it lets us focus entirely on the drawing office and on the volume of work that piles up there.
Clients come to us because they are short of capacity. That might be a peak in the schedule, a drafter who drops out, or a revision round on an existing DWG set that has been waiting for months.
We take that work over in our own environment with our own licences and deliver in the format the client uses. The work is carried out remotely from our own office, nationwide, for clients in the Netherlands. You are welcome to visit, but the work itself remains remote. What eventually goes out is drafting that matches the client's standard and has passed through several pairs of eyes before it leaves our office.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
How our architectural drawings service works
It starts with a conversation. Barry, our project manager, is usually the first point of contact for a new enquiry and goes through what is there, how big the set is and what deadline applies. After that, Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side, so you keep one fixed point of contact and do not get a different name on the line every week. We then ask for the details and usually the existing drawings, because in practice it is often material that needs revising. The more complete that package is when it arrives, the sooner we can start.
We do not deliver everything at once at the end. A first batch goes to the client, we collect feedback on it, we incorporate that feedback, and only then does the next batch start. That rhythm prevents a wrong assumption from working its way through a hundred drawings for two weeks. The rhythm of meetings differs per client. With a tight schedule we meet every two days; for calmer work, weekly is enough. We exchange files by email. On larger projects we use software the client can log into to follow progress, as is common on greenhouse construction projects.
For standalone AutoCAD drafting, email remains the quickest option. Day-to-day contact runs through email, phone calls and meetings, and we come round whenever a conversation at the table is quicker than three rounds of email. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days. So if you need architectural drawings made, you will know fairly quickly whether the work is a good fit for us and when the first batch can be ready.
An as-built file that was half drawn by hand
One of the projects we carried out for Firefly shows clearly where this kind of work gets stuck in practice. The as-built material supplied had been printed incorrectly, was partly hand-drawn and in places barely legible. A file like that is no longer a drafting job; first it is a reconstruction. We could have phoned about every unclear point, but then the problem shifts to the client, who still ends up spending hours in the file. So we sorted it out ourselves, extracted the logic from the material, recognised the recurring components and only then started drawing.
It was still delivered neatly. What we take from that is that the first day of a revision project is rarely real drafting. That day is spent organising what is there. If you assume an existing set is correct, you end up copying existing errors. As standard, we assume a supplied set has gaps and look for them first.
For Firefly we have now completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings, and that pattern keeps coming back. There was also a deadline in between that could not move. The team then worked through evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, even during a planned holiday of Sam, the team leader. That is not a way of working we offer as a fixed standard, but it does say something about what happens once a date is set. Having architectural drawings made from messy source material mainly requires someone who is willing to get to the bottom of it.
No ongoing payroll costs and no idle staff once the peak is over. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work simply carries on.
Architectural drawings made to your CAD standard
We do not have our own house style for drafting that we impose on clients. We work to the client's standard and drawing conventions, which they give us. That means the layer structure agreed within the company, the existing title blocks, the hatching used, the way dimensioning and annotation are set up, and the file naming. A set that is technically correct but deviates from the internal convention still costs the client's drafting team half a day of cleaning up. That is exactly the time saving outsourcing was supposed to deliver. So at the start we ask for a representative sample sheet from the existing set and for the drawing protocol, if there is one. If there is no protocol, we derive the conventions from the existing work and present our assumptions to you.
That takes one meeting and prevents a correction round across the entire set. We work in Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, as well as Inventor and Grasshopper and, to a limited extent, Dynamo and Vault, always in the latest versions. Delivery is in DXF, DWG, Revit formats or STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format. We work in our own environment with our own licences rather than in the client's environment, which saves you having to free up workstations and licences. The intellectual property of everything we draw belongs to the client. So when you have architectural drawings made by us, you get a file back that fits straight into your own folder structure and way of working.
Three review layers on every architectural drawing
With us, work passes through at least three review layers before it goes out. A drafter produces the work, a second team member checks it, Sam then reviews the technical side as team leader and Barry, as project manager, goes over it one final time. Four pairs of eyes on the same file sounds heavy for a single floor plan, but it pays off as soon as there is volume in the assignment.
Across hundreds of drawings, an error is rarely an isolated one. A wrongly applied layer or a deviating symbol repeats itself throughout the set and only comes to light on site or at the supplier. The second check mainly catches issues in the drafting itself, such as a dimension that does not update, a component on the wrong layer or a detail worked out differently on two sheets.
Sam's review covers the technical logic of the whole and whether the set matches what was supplied. The final check looks at completeness and at the agreements made in the first conversation. As a result, the number of errors that remain is small in practice. Sam has more than fifteen years of background in architecture, worked abroad for seven years, ran his own design practice in the Netherlands and is still active as an engineer.
Every drafter on our team has more than ten years of CAD experience. What we can show you is completed work, not a promise on paper. That is why, as far as we are concerned, having architectural drawings made often starts with a small first assignment, so you can judge our speed and accuracy for yourself.
Frequently asked questions about our architectural drawings service
Let us produce your architectural drawings
Send us your documents and drawing conventions and we will let you know within one to two working days what we can take on and when.