TECHNICAL TIPS FOR DRAWING FLOORPLANS

Making Your Final Drawing.

Make sure you pay close attention to detail and use careful workmanship. Try making a practice drawing to begin.

You will use the five kinds of lines described below to make the final drawing.
Border lines
Hidden lines
Dimension lines
Window lines
Door lines

Border lines: Border lines are thick lines describing the visible walls of your room.

Hidden lines: Hidden lines are lines you can't see but which still describe a part of the room. The lines showing where your closet is located are hidden lines.

Dimension lines: Dimension lines are narrow lines with an arrow at each end. They show where each wall measurement starts and ends. The dimension size is usually written above the dimension line.

MAkING A SCALE DRAWING The hardest part of the project involves making the drawing to scale. This means we want the room floorplan to be in proportion, but we are going to make the measurements on the drawing smaller so it will fit onto the paper. Look at the measurements you took of your room. Look at the measurements of the rough floorplan sketch to the right. First, we are going to divide each wall measurement you made in centimeters by 50. This means the drawing will be on a scale of one to fifty. To help us we will use a calculator to divide the number.

Look at the measurements of the rough sketch above. In our rough sketch, the opposite walls are both the same length, and so we have two measurements. In some of your rooms the opposite walls might be different lengths, and so you will have more than two measurements to make. The longest measurement in our example is 467 cm. When we divide 467 cm by 50 we get 9.3 cm. When we make the final drawing in the example, 9.3 cm is the "scale" measurement showing the length of the longest wall.