DESIGNING FLOOR PLANS THE PROCESS

Tools for Drawing Floor Plans

- T-square - Adjustable triangle - Mechanical pencils with leads - Felt tip pens - Erasers - Erasing shields (for accurate erasing of only specific parts of your drawing) - Compass - Symbol template - Long metal ruler or straight edge - Tracing paper - Masking tape - Big flat working surface (table) - White poster board as a base for your working surface Optional but nice: - Parallel ruler (for drawing parallel lines — alternatively you can also use a T- square)

THE BLUEPRINT PAGE ITSELF

To make your own blueprint floor plans, use a sheet of paper 2A. Lay the sheet down on your working surface with the longest edge running horizontally. The lower right-hand corner of your drawing you will save for your title block. This is where you will write the name of the view you are drawing (floor plan, elevation, cross section), the scale of the drawing, the name of the house (could just be the family name), designer's name and date.

DRAW EXTERIOR WALLS.

Start drawing the exterior walls of your design. You will want to roughly center your fist floor plan view in the space on the paper provided excluding the title block. So before drawing your first wall, use your scale and get a rough idea on how much space on the page your floor plan will need. We will move in a clockwise direction starting at the upper left hand corner of your drawing. You can choose how you will orient the home on the page. It is fairly standard to have the front door at the lower side of the horizontal sheet but depending on the design or shape of your plan you may want to alter this. For the floor plan drawings, you will draw the framed walls, interior and exterior. That is, you will not be drawing the finished dimensions of the rooms once drywall or other finished wall surfaces are installed.

Other drawings will detail finished surfaces of exterior and interior walls as required.

1. Use a pencil, your scale and a straight edge to draw what the total inside dimension of the first wall will be until it meets another wall. 2. Use your T-square (or a protractor for a wall not at a square angle to the previous wall) and scale to draw the next wall. 3. Continue in this fashion, clockwise around your drawing until the inside framing side of all of your exterior walls are drawn. 4. Finally, draw the outside of the exterior wall framing in regards to the scale given and wall thickness provided.

DRAW INTERIOR WALLS

For your interior walls:

1. Draw both sides of each interior wall, just draw each wall, we'll locate doors and any openings later. 2. Draw walls around any stairwell areas. This helps visualize the stairwell area as a room. If there will not be a physical wall around the stairwell, simply draw a faint dotted line. 3. Draw staircases and any mid-stair landings within these walls. 4. Draw an arrow labeled "up" in the up direction of the stair.