Construction Contract Documents: Including Plan Reading Essentials and Extensive Lists of Abbreviations and Construction Glossary Terms

The purpose of contract document courses taught by this author over the past three decades has been to provide students and professionals of all levels the ability and confidence to ‘read’ different types of plans, or drawings. There is not a great and economical book on this topic and those that do exist include copies of several sets of expensive drawings. This book includes introductions to construction documents, contract documents, the design process, and an extensive discussion of drawings and specifications and why it is important that we ‘read’ various contract documents.There does not appear to be a comprehensive source of construction abbreviations and glossary terms available until now. The source of many of the abbreviations and glossary terms included here are from the author’s other publications as well as a thorough review of other construction management books, but most importantly from several sets of construction contract documents including drawing sets.The concept of ‘how to’ read a set construction drawings is difficult for some to get their arms around and even more difficult to write or read about. One cannot simply read a book about plan reading, there are several available, but the only way to learn this construction management tool is to ‘do it’. The way this author teaches the topic is to have students open drawings and we slowly leaf through them together, pointing out important items on each sheet and within each design discipline, and then assign them a list of items to find on their own by hunting through the drawings. The exercises become progressively more involved as the course moves along.