‘I’m no good with drawings’ is a very common statement that I hear from my clients. Although, I don’t remember it ever being said by a man. Now, I don’t believe for one minute that women have some inherent gender-based problem with maps or plans and I know that the flattening out of our 3D world into 2D can be an alien step for different brains and temperaments. Perhaps it comes down to who is willing to speak out about things they struggle with – see my other post on What is a Section?
I want to suggest a few tips that might help a plan make more sense to those that find them difficult.
Let’s assume for the time being that we are working on an extension or refurbishment of your existing house, so the plan will include some or all of a house you are familiar with.
1. Look on the drawings for the clues which tell you which is the front and back.
Is the street labelled? If not, look at the window and door layouts. Even on the simplest plan, a window will be shown differently to a solid wall. Like this:
2. A door might look like this:
3. Now think about a room you know, where are the windows and the doors? Find it on the plan and turn the plan – either the physical paper or the pdf say – until it makes sense for you. Don’t worry, for now, if that means any text is upside down or sideways.
Better still, if you are in that room, turn the plan to match the direction you are facing.
Here is a photo of a Living Room.
And here is the plan aligned with that room.
If I turn around I can see the sliding doors and the door to the hall and I would re-align the plan to suit the direction I am looking.
4. The key thing to start doing now is to relate the size and shape on the drawing to the room you know. This might be harder to do electronically where you can zoom in and zoom out so let’s think about the relationship to an adjacent space. The living room door links to the hall and stair. It’s rare to have a spacious entrance hall in a British town house so take a look at this next plan. Can you see that the hall is bigger than the living room?
Plans have to be drawn to scale – that is, they need to be an accurate reduction of the size of the house in real life, 1/100th (or 1:100) say. And all of it needs to have the same relation to each other.
So in fact the hall and stair look like this.
Now, you know the size of your stair, and your corridor, and the doors you walk through, you do it every day. Can you link that memory to the spaces shown on the drawing?
5. When you are looking at a plan of any building, look at the doors and use them as a gauge for the room sizes.
Here’s a plan of the whole ground floor with the proposed extension in blue.
Even without any measurements (and even though the whole image is smaller on the screen than the previous ones), can you start to get a feel for how big that space is?
It’s a lot to ask from a rectangle on a page, I know. Try to picture the ceiling at the same height as your other rooms. Walk through the door from the hall in your mind and picture the full width of the wall in front of you.
Let’s put some windows on the plan.
The extension is almost as big as the original house’s floor plan so this is a comparatively large space which might suit whatever it is going to be used for – a reception room? A kitchen? Or it might be too big (as well as raising questions about what happens to the other existing, now very internal, spaces). So let’s look at another option.
This is a smaller extension making a space a bit narrower than the living room but long and thin by comparison.
Finally let’s look at what happens if we remove some of the walls of the existing house.
Now we have a space about the same size as the first extension we looked at (less new build but more structure to hold up existing).
How is the visualizing going?
Just to complicate things, I have to add that we often use dashed lines to indicate things above, like downstand beams (a downstand projects down from the ceiling, it's usually a steel clad in plasterboard). This might make it harder to picture the main space and I would suggest, if that’s the case, you ask your designer or architect to leave them off at the design stage while you are working together on the proposal.
Coming soon – Is that supposed to be a chair? And, how big is a millimetre?
Check out the linked posts below for more clues to understanding drawings.
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