How to Measure and Draw Floor Plans to Scale
Drawing a floor plan to scale is an important skill for designers and builders to master. Whether you’re a contractor planning a new home design or a designer creating a furniture layout, accurate floor plans are a must. However, traditional methods for creating floor plans are often time-consuming, overly complicated, or less than accurate.
Finally, there’s a better way.
In this 5-minute read, we’ll share some pro tips that help you measure and draw a floor plan faster than ever. Plus, you’ll see how easy it is to create 2D and 3D floor plans with modern design software like Cedreo. Then you’ll be able to use those designs to impress clients and land more deals.
Let’s start with some tips for accurately measuring the floor plan.
Accurately Measure Floor Plan Dimensions
Before you start to draw a floor plan, you first need the measurements. It’s time to get out your tape measurer and a pen and paper. You can use graph paper and an architect’s ruler as well, but they’re not really necessary for this step. The idea at this point is to make a rough sketch with measurements that you can then refer to as you draw the floor plan in Cedreo.
Although it’s important to be accurate, the degree of accuracy will depend on your project. If you’re drawing a plan to help layout furniture, you can get away with being accurate down to the nearest inch. If your project includes installing kitchen cabinets or bathroom fixtures, then you need to be as accurate as possible (down to the nearest ¼” or ⅛”).
#1 Measure the room or building perimeter
#2 Measure interior and exterior walls
#3 Measure doors and windows
Once you’ve finished with all the walls, it’s time to add the wall openings. When measuring an opening, start by measuring from the nearest corner to the inside of the door or window jamb. Then measure the width between each side of the door or window jamb. Don’t forget to measure the height of each window or door, as well as how many inches it is from the floor (in the case of the windows). This will come in handy later when creating the 3D plans.
As you add the doors to your sketch, don’t forget to mark which way the door opens. And depending on how detailed you need your plans to be, you can also measure and take note of things like the type of casing around the openings as well as how many inches wide it is.