I know this subject has come up before in other threads, and I have been one of the guys asking the questions, but since then I have put some thought into it and am trying to come up with something suitable for us that is geared towards what we are doing right now.

First off, we do mostly residential, but will be doing more commercial in the future depending on some new hires etc., so that's down the road. But the convention has to be able to fit whatever wall types we may run into.

For now, we mostly use wood walls, gyp, sheathing, stucco, wainscots for exterior thin brick etc. Nothing to extravagant. But even with these, I see a ton of different combinations as far as wall types are concerned.

I have the WLC wall types template that Scott Davis posted some time back and had him explain to me what and how theirs was used. aaronrumple explained in a thread how their firm was coming up with and starting to implement a naming convention for their wall types. So I have done as much research as I can with the resources available to me and have just ended up with a bunch of questions. I think I'm starting to make things pretty confusing for myself and could use some suggestions on how to move forward.

I would like to keep the actual wall type mark as simple as I can, so I don't end up trying to describe the wall type through the type mark itself, i.e. E6G,GSSA (Exterior, 6 inch, Gyp, Gyp-Sheathing-Stucco, 3.5" insulation). I think it's too long and I just don't like it much. I think a combination of a wall type name and a wall type legend or legend and schedule may be the answer. In WLC's wall types, they have defined A-Z and started over with double alpha from A-Z again, which makes sense. Just start thinking of diff. wall type combinations you use and give it a letter. But how do you make this information understood in your documents. Say you had a wood stud, with gyp. on each side and you called this wall type 'A'. Then you had a wood stud, gyp on int. side, 3/8" sheathing ext., and plaster ext. and you called it wall type 'B'. Would you have a legend that graphically displayed this wall type for every single one you came up with. That would mean you would have equal amount of wall type legends as you do wall types. Seems like a lot of drawing just for walls. Or would you create a legend that could describe a wall type using a combination of a graphical detail and a schedule? There seems like there is a compromise here somewhere and I just can't come up with a good format that would be easy enough to manage and make sense to both the people drawing the walls and the people having to understand the information in the documents to build the walls.

Basically, I'm just asking for some advise. I don't want to figure out and draw all my wall types right now. I have a project coming up that will use 8-10 diff. types throughout, so I just want to develop a good nomenclature that will enable me to fit any wall type into and I can just keep adding to from there. I just want to start off using a good organizational method to begin with so I can focus on what I'm doing rather than winging it every time. I'm having a hard time conceptualizing this idea and making a decision.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
Josh