Farewell old friend

We’ve finally said goodbye to our trusty large format plotter, which has printed out A2 and A1 plans for most of our clients over the last 10+ years.

At final count its meter had recorded 24,573 metres of printing, which is enough paper to stretch from our office in Ferrymead all the way to Little River! We’ve donated 25 trees to be planted by Trees For Canterbury to offset those that went into producing all that paper.

While we still print out plans to review designs with our clients, much of our work is now done using the large screen in our meeting room. This enables us to walk clients through the computer model of their new home so they can understand it in greater detail and instantly see the effect of making changes such as materials and window sizes. It’s a great design tool, and ensures our clients can understand how their home will look and feel even if they’re not experienced at reading plans.

Thankfully councils and builders now use electronic files, and we’re able to greatly reduce the amount of paper we use. In the past we needed to print off up to 8 sets of the completed plans to send to council  for building consent and to builders for pricing, quickly adding up to a very large stack of paper for a projects with 20-30 sheets of drawings. These days it’s more likely to be just a set for our client and a set of the approved building consent drawings for the contractor to keep on site, and our new plotter can print those in full colour on waterproof paper.