Plan printing for builders, architects and self-builders

For a set of building plans, scale is not a preference. It is the whole point. A building inspector or planning officer measuring off a drawing that has been shrunk by a few percent to fit a printer's margins is measuring the wrong building.

We print at 100%, always. Tell us the sheet size the drawing was set up for, whether A1, A0 or whatever the title block says, and we print it at exactly that size. We never let the printer driver scale to fit, which is the default on most home and office printers and the reason so many self printed plans get rejected.

What to send. PDF is best, exported at the intended sheet size with a scale bar in the drawing if there is one. If you are exporting from AutoCAD, Revit or SketchUp, plot to PDF at 1:1 with the correct paper size selected rather than exporting a view. DWG we can handle by arrangement, so call first and we will check the file opens correctly and the layers are as you expect.

Check your line weights. Hairline and very fine lines look fine on screen and can disappear at print, particularly on a lighter drawing. If your plan is mostly fine linework, ask us for a small test print of a section before we run a full A0 set. It costs almost nothing and it is the difference between a usable drawing and a faint one.

Colour or black and white? Line drawings print sharper and cheaper in black and white, with A1 at £8 mono against £10 colour. Colour earns its place when you have shaded zones, services drawings with colour coded runs, or a landscape plan. For a planning submission, follow whatever the authority asks for.

If a drawing arrives at the wrong size, with the title block cut off, or as an image rather than vector, we can usually sort it. Just say so when you send it.

The pattern is consistent. Email the PDF in the morning, collect at lunchtime, go to site in the afternoon. Book before 12pm and prints are ready the same day, and this is the whole reason architects, builders, interior designers and self builders across East London use us instead of a courier based service. If something lands at 3pm and you need it for a 10am meeting, tell us and we will usually still make it.

Full sets or single sheets. There is no minimum sheet count. A single A1 at £8 is fine and so is a forty sheet set. A3 uses bracket pricing, at £1 each for the first nineteen, 90p from twenty, 80p from fifty and 60p from a hundred. A2, A1 and A0 are a flat rate per sheet at any quantity.

Rolled or folded. Rolled is right for anything going straight onto a site table or into a tube. Folded to A4 is right for anything going into a file, a submission pack or an inspector's hands. Tell us which when you order, because folding a set properly is a job in itself and we would rather do it than have you do it on a bonnet.

Old drawings. If you are working from paper originals, such as a survey from decades ago or a previous owner's extension drawings, we scan up to A0 at £6 a scan by appointment. You get a clean digital file you can email to your architect, mark up, or reprint whenever you need, which is the cheapest way to stop carrying a fragile original around.

Everything else on the job. Site notices and safety signage on 5mm Foamex, which survives a British winter on a hoarding, and method statements, O and M manuals and tender documents through document printing and binding.