The Importance Of Understanding A Home’s Floor Plan

The one thing that will tell you more about a house’s construction and anatomy is the floor plan. This drawing, which represents the physical construction and layout of the home, is helpful to realtors, architects, appraisers, builders and homeowners. With it, individuals can see much of the information that is needed in order to buy, build, decorate or remodel a home. Of course, there are other aspects of the home that can’t be seen with this plan, so it is important that anyone looking for full information has access to other plans, too, like schematic blue prints and renderings.

What The Floor Plan Includes

The home’s floor plan can reveal multiple aspects of a home, including the layout of the rooms, location of doors and windows, plumbing fixtures, stairwells and the area and dimensions of the home. The following will give you a brief description of how to interpret what you will see on a floor plan.

• Area – Every plan will give a bird’s-eye view of the layout of the house. This is basically a two-dimensional, scaled overview. It allows you to see exactly where each room is in relation to the others, as well as how the flow and circulation of the home works. It will give you a measurement of the area of each room, which is the length of the room multiplied by the width of the room, and the house as a whole. This is extremely helpful for understanding the size furniture you need, or the dimensions of rugs or carpeting you would like to install.
• Doors – On a floor plan, doors are shown as if they are opened. A straight line will run perpendicular to the wall, which is where the hinges attach to it. From the opposite side of the door opening, a curved line comes up to attach to the end of the door. It looks like a quarter of a circle, and suggests which direction the door will swing. This gives great insight to special relationships and how to arrange a room for proper flow.
• Legend – The legend indicates what the project is and how you should look at it. It may include the name of the person or company that the plan is for, the scale of the drawing, a north arrow, and possibly the architect’s name and the date.
• Stairways – Stairs on a plan will look like a sequence of parallel lines. An arrow on the stairs, with the word “up” or “down” will specify which direction those stairs are headed from that level of the house.
• Walls – When looking at the plan, you will see a lot of lines. Many of them will be the walls, which are very important in a drawing. A thin wall will have two lines close together, while a thicker wall will have more space in between the lines. There may be an additional indication as to how thick the walls are, or sometimes the scale in the legend will indicate that.
• Windows – A window will be shown as three lines in the wall, running parallel with it.

There are often other markings on the plan that can represent plumbing, electrical, duct work or other, customized features. To understand what every detail represents, you may elect to speak to a real estate agent or architect.

Knowing how to read a floor plan is a valuable skill no matter what role you are in – buyer, seller, home flipper, etc. At Levine Homes Real Estate, we believe everyone benefits when they know what they’re looking at.