Paper plans to tablet took me two years to accept

I used to sketch every job on graph paper with a mechanical pencil, and I kept a binder of past projects that weighed maybe 15 pounds. About 18 months ago, I switched to a cheap tablet with a stylus for all my house renovation layouts, mostly because I lost a set of plans at a job site in Tacoma and had to redraw everything. I still print out a paper copy for the crew on site, but the tablet version is what I actually measure against. Has anyone else made the same switch and gone back to paper for certain tasks, or is it all digital now?

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the_eric21d ago

Did you catch that thing on the radio last month about how contractors are going back to paper for final walkthroughs? I heard this one guy say he keeps a folded up copy in his truck just to double check measurements when the sun hits the tablet screen wrong. I do the same thing, especially for tile layouts or anything with angles. The tablet is great for the big picture and moving walls around, but there's something about a real pencil line that doesn't lie when you're standing in a dusty room trying to find a stud. I even keep an old binder of just the tricky jobs from the last few years, the ones with weird foundation issues or weird roof lines. It's not that I don't trust the digital stuff, it's just that paper never runs out of battery and never shows me a fuzzy zoom that turns a half inch into an inch.