Anyone looking for a Revit drafting partner usually has one question: can this team take over our drafting without us having to stand over them? Our answer is yes, and below we explain how. We draft and model in Revit for engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers that are temporarily or structurally short on drafting capacity.
We do not do engineering, calculations or permits; we take over the drafting. That covers floor plans, sections, details, as-built drawings and revision rounds on existing sets.
Our large, flexible team scales with each project, from one drafter for a small job to as many drafters as a peak demands. Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and Sam, our team leader, directs the technical side. Barry, our project manager, is your first point of contact for a new enquiry, so your project lead does not have to juggle five different people. We respond to an enquiry within 1 to 2 working days. That is followed by a conversation in which we go through the project.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Revit drafting in practice on an as-built file
Firefly once sent us an as-built file that was in poor shape. The existing drawings had been printed askew, part of it had been added by hand and the dimensions sat in places nobody could trace back any more. We had two options: call the client every day with questions, or work it out ourselves. We chose the second. Our team went through the set piece by piece, reconstructed the logic behind the handwritten notes and only picked up the phone on points where a decision from the client was genuinely needed.
The result was a clean, consistent set they could work with. That project still shapes how we approach Revit drafting. We ask a lot of questions at the start, so that we can then work on independently. We deliver in stages rather than all at once at the end, so your project lead can see early on whether the direction is right. We keep track of the assumptions we have made and put them to you at the next feedback moment. The same project also had a deadline that could not move.
Our team worked evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, and the work carried on even during a planned holiday of Sam's. We do not call that a special achievement, but it does say something about how we treat an agreement. More than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings later, we spot the pitfalls in this kind of file fairly quickly. If you have a similar file sitting on the shelf, you can bring it to us in a first conversation.
What we deliver as a Revit drafting partner
We take over the drafting that belongs in Revit and everything around it. Specifically, that means floor plans, elevations, sections, details, standard details and general arrangement drawings, plus the associated sheets. We model in 3D where the model is the basis, and derive the 2D drawings from it. As-built drawings and revision rounds make up a large part of our work. We also build parametric Revit families, in other words smart components that adapt to a different size or a new situation.
We clean up existing families and templates, or rebuild them if the existing set is too messy to repair. Besides Revit, we work in AutoCAD and Rhino, as well as Inventor, Grasshopper and, to a lesser extent, Dynamo and Vault. We deliver in DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format. We always work with the latest versions, in our own environment and on our own licences. You therefore do not need to free up workstations, licences or accounts for us.
What we do not do is equally clear: no engineering, no structural calculations, no advice on permits. We draft and model, and we do so at high volume and with a lot of repetition. It is precisely that repetitive part where an external party makes the difference. You own the intellectual property of everything we create. A short trial job is fine, and it is often the quickest way to see whether our way of working suits you.
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.
What the delivered Revit set contains
The delivered set has to be ready to use in your downstream process, not just look right on our screen. That is why we deliver the model plus the finished drawings, in the formats needed at your end. For a revision round, you get the updated files back in the same structure in which we received them, so nobody has to go looking. We stick to the file names the project already uses. If the set includes families we have built or cleaned up, we supply them separately, so your own drafting team can reuse them in future projects. With a parametric family, the material schedule updates along with it: if the component changes, the schedule changes automatically. On delivery, we briefly set out which choices we have made and which points still need a decision from you.
Delivery happens in stages. We send a part, gather feedback, make adjustments and move on to the next part. Files usually go back and forth by email. For larger projects such as greenhouse construction, you get software you can log into and follow progress. For standalone drafting in AutoCAD, we keep things simple and deliver by email. Before anything leaves the building, it has passed through at least three review layers. As a result, the number of errors stays minimal in practice and your project lead does not have to act as proofreader. If you want to know what such a delivery would look like for your project, the easiest way is to discuss it in a first conversation.
The client's CAD standards and layer structure
We work to your CAD standards, not ours. You send us that standard at the start of the project, together with the existing sets we will build on. It covers the layer structure, layer names, line weights, hatching, text sizes, symbols, title blocks and the way sheets are numbered. If some of those conventions are not written down, we derive them from the existing drawings and put our interpretation to you for confirmation.
That takes half an hour at the start and prevents a correction round across the whole set. In Revit, this also means tying into your existing templates, view templates and filters, rather than introducing a structure of our own unasked.
If the existing family set is clogged with variants nobody uses any more, we point that out and propose cleaning it up or rebuilding it. Which is wiser depends on the state of the set, and when there is a lot of clutter, rebuilding is sometimes faster than repairing. The choice is yours; we just provide the reasoning. We match the rhythm of our check-ins to the pace of the project.
On a tight schedule we speak every two days, on a calmer project weekly. Contact runs via email, phone and meetings, and where it helps we visit you or you come to us. The work itself is carried out remotely from our own office, and we cover the Netherlands. If you want to test whether our work matches your standard, you can have us start with a small first job.
Frequently asked questions about a Revit drafting partner
Make us your Revit drafting partner
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.