A floor plan is a scaled drawing of a building or room as seen from directly above, as if cut horizontally about a metre above the floor. It shows walls, doors (with their swing), windows, stairs, fixed elements like kitchens and bathrooms, and usually dimensions.
Reading a floor plan
- Scale: common scales are 1:50 for a single room or flat and 1:100 for a whole house; 1 cm on paper is 50 or 100 cm in reality.
- Walls: thick lines are usually structural or external walls, thinner lines are partitions.
- Doors: drawn as a gap with an arc showing which way they open.
- Windows: thin double or triple lines within the wall.
- Dimensions: given in millimetres or centimetres on professional plans.
Floor plan vs furniture plan
A floor plan shows the architecture; a furniture plan (or layout plan) adds furniture at real size to test the furniture layout.
Making one
Free tools such as Sweet Home 3D (open source), Floorplanner and HomeByMe let you draw your own plan to scale. AI plan generators can propose layouts from a list of rooms, but a plan meant for building work must be checked by a professional.