Answer six questions and get the drawing-by-drawing breakdown of a typical Bay Area residential submittal for your project, with a realistic total.
Nothing here is a quote, a bid, an engineering determination or a boundary determination. We are a drafting and design firm: we coordinate with a licensed structural engineer and a Licensed Land Surveyor when your project needs one, rather than performing or stamping that work ourselves.
Nobody reviewing your drawings is impressed that you fit them onto six sheets. Plan check runs off a checklist, and each line on it has to be locatable somewhere in the package. Stack three drawings onto one sheet, or leave off a schedule because the information seemed self-evident, and the reviewer writes a correction, because there is no box for assuming. Every correction cycle costs weeks, and most Bay Area jurisdictions include only a limited number of review rounds before resubmittal fees begin.
Sheet count is therefore worth checking early, as a sanity test. A detached ADU submitted on four sheets is missing something, and the reviewer will find it. Spread the same ADU across eleven or twelve sheets, carrying a real cover and code data page, a dimensioned site plan, floor plans and a roof plan, all four elevations, sections, a door and window schedule, details, the energy documentation and CALGreen notes, and every checklist item has an obvious home.
Structural moves the number more than anything else. Once a foundation plan, framing sheets and a shear wall schedule enter the picture, that is another three to five pages, produced under the seal of an independently licensed engineer we coordinate with rather than by us. A remodel that leaves the structure alone drops all of that, and usually the roof plan and exterior elevations along with it.
Site work is the next lever. Grading, drainage, a driveway or anything else that redirects water across the lot tends to bring in a separate civil sheet, and a sloped parcel in Los Gatos, Saratoga or Los Altos Hills gets asked for far more site documentation than a level lot in Santa Clara. MEP is the genuinely unpredictable one on residential work: some departments are happy to see mechanical, electrical and plumbing carried as notes and schedules across the architectural sheets, others insist on dedicated pages, and that single preference can swing the total by three.
Energy documentation is the piece people leave off. A registered CF1R belongs inside the printed set, not handed across the counter separately, which is normally one or two sheets. Title 24 and CF1R energy calculations covers how those get produced, and permit sets and expediting covers how the package is assembled and filed. Nothing about a drawing set guarantees how a review will go. What a complete one does is remove the easy reasons to send it back.
No, but a surprisingly small one is almost always hiding a gap. What you want is a single obvious location for each item the reviewer is checking. Squeezing a floor plan, a roof plan and a schedule onto one sheet lowers the count and raises the correction rate, because nothing can be read at the scale it needs to be read at.
No. Those are produced and stamped by an independently licensed engineer. Our job is to coordinate the architectural drawings against that engineer's package so the two agree and the sheet index reads as a single set. We do not perform or stamp engineering. The estimator still counts those sheets, because they are part of what crosses the counter.
Because the answer genuinely varies by city on residential work. Some are content to see mechanical, electrical and plumbing carried as notes and schedules across the architectural sheets. Others want dedicated pages, especially on new construction or an ADU running its own service. Selecting "not sure" widens the range instead of forcing a guess, and a phone call to your building department will settle it.
Yes, and several commonly do. Recurring extras include a fire access or defensible space sheet where the parcel sits in a wildland urban interface area, green building or CALGreen broken out on its own page, a stormwater or C.3 sheet, a survey, and a landscape or water efficiency sheet when a planning condition calls for one. Every department publishes its own submittal checklist, and reading it before drafting begins is time well spent.
Residential or commercial, drafting or Title 24 — send a few details and we'll follow up with next steps and a free quote.
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Sunny Drafting