Practice
Don't pass unanswered questions through your drawings
20 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Every drawing you issue with a gap in it hands that gap to someone with less information than you had. Usually that is a person holding a saw, on a Friday.
Don't pass unanswered questions through your drawings. Having to cater to the whims of interior designers who have no qualifications other than enjoying Pinterest leaves a LOT of unanswered questions. They don't know how to build it. They don't know how to draw it. They will approve your drawing with the same incomplete/unbuildable design. Their approval, while necessary for contract, is meaningless. If you want to know if your drawings are good, ask the people who have to build from them.
r/Millwork
Approval is not an answer
An approved drawing records one thing: the client accepted the look. It does not say the thing can be built, that the parts exist, or that the dimensions close. A reviewer who cannot build it cannot find the hole in it, so the signature travels straight past the problem and lands on you.
A set has two audiences, and only one of them can catch your mistakes. It is not the one signing.
Where the questions hide
Dimensions that do not close
Add the parts and compare against the overall. A run of cabinets that sums to 2,847 mm inside an opening drawn at 2,840 mm is a question, and on site it becomes a scribe somebody improvises without telling you.
Anything the designer drew that has no thickness
A reveal with no dimension. A shadow line that implies a rebate nobody specified. A mitre drawn as a line. If the drawing implies construction it does not describe, that is the shop floor's decision now, and the shop floor will make the cheap one.
Hardware that is named but not located
Specifying a hinge is not the same as boring for one. Either give the setting-out or say explicitly that it is the shop's — but do not leave it ambiguous. That is the ambiguity that ruins doors in batches.
Site conditions you have assumed
Every dimension taken from the architect's plan rather than a field measure is an assumption. Mark it as one. VIF on a dimension is a real answer; a plain number that happens to be wrong is not.
The junction with another trade
Where your work meets tiling, stone, electrical or plasterboard, somebody owns the tolerance. If your set does not say who, both trades will assume the other does.
What to do instead of guessing
- Write the question down and send it. An RFI costs a day. A wrong assumption costs a rebuild, and the rebuild is charged to whoever cannot prove they asked.
- Draw the assumption explicitly when you must proceed. Note it on the sheet, in the general notes, so approval covers it. Silence is what makes it yours.
- Walk the set to the floor before it goes out. The people who build from your drawings will find in ten minutes what a reviewer will not find at all.