Hello and welcome to my guide to create a perfect floor plan. This is written for those of you who need to create floor plans on a regular base and this article will save you time and might prevent some frustrations that you might have if you start drawing your first plans. In this article I will go through the logical steps to create a correct and good looking floor plan and give some tips for each step. If you have any questions regarding this guide or about Floorplanner in general please let us know. Good luck,

Gido Tervooren | Graphical Designer at Floorplanner.com

1. Import and Scale drawing (only when you have an existing drawing)

Well first of all we have to import a drawing of the house or situation you'd like to create a floor plan for. This can be done in "Create plan" dialog window that appears when you create a new plan. When that's done you need to scale that drawing so all the furniture that would be added after the floor plan is finished is in the same scale. You can find the scale function in the drawing properties menu (6th icon in your construction tool bar) It's handy if the drawing contains some measurements so you can do the scaling process more precisely.

TIP : If you can't find a measurement anywhere, the thing I always do is to scale a door on the drawing and enter 0.9 m on the scale menu that appears after you drew a scale-line. That should be about right. Check this link to see where we are now with our imported and scaled drawing: View example Notice that it's transparent!

2. Drawing the main area.

Well we've imported a drawing and scaled it and now the first thing I do is draw a big room with the "draw-room-tool" that covers most of the drawing. Make sure that the background picture is "on top" of the room you just created and I normally set this background image at a transparency of about 75-85. This way you can easily see where you like to draw your rooms, windows, doors and furniture.

The reason I draw the outer walls first is very simple and that is because in the end when all rooms are created it takes less time then to draw every room one by one : View example

3. Create multiple rooms

With the uploaded drawing scaled and the main room ready I start to fill in some of the bigger rooms and walls. I do so by selecting the "draw-room-tool" and creating new rooms by starting every room from an existing corner point. After one room is created it's only possible to draw a new room from an existing corner point.

If you want to start a new room at a place where you have no corner point you can create a new one by clicking on a wall where you'd like the new corner point to appear and select "Split Wall Here" on the pop up-menu that appears. A new corner point is added and from there you can draw a whole new room.

Adding corner points is also very handy when you want to (for example) make a rectangle-shaped room into an L-shaped room. Add a corner point and then you can pull either half of the wall you just divided with this extra corner point: View example

4. Draw every single room and wall

Now within the bigger rooms we're going to create the smaller ones. Make sure you don't overlap walls and always try to make the corner points connect. When floor plans are getting complicated there might be some blank spaces in some rooms. This means some corner points and walls are overlapping and not connecting well. You can solve this by pulling some corner points and look if other walls that shouldn't be there show themselves. If so then there are some corner points that needs to connect. If every room is filled with a space then you'll know that everything is done well. This is how it looks when it's all well connected: View example

5. Wall Thickness

After all the rooms and walls are drawn it is time to give them the correct thickness. Just click on a wall and you can make them thinner or thicker by either entering a number or pressing the arrow buttons. The thickness increases or decreases at both sides so it is important that the walls are drawn in the middle of the uploaded drawing and not to the far left or right. It happens when 2 adjacent walls have 2 different thicknesses and then you have to pull one wall so they align well. This can be tricky because pulling a wall means more corner points and they tend to snap to each other when you're just aligning some different sized walls. You can also solve this by drawing a black single wall to make up for some extra thickness without risking "corner point-trouble".

There are some single walls that just end in the middle of the room like a wall against a shower or a kitchen. You can draw this with the line drawing tool (3rd icon in the construction menu). Or you can create a room and split the walls and delete the parts you don't need.

It can be time consuming by adjusting the thickness when not all the rooms are already drawn. Just begin with this when you're absolutely certain these are the rooms and walls you want to work with: View example

6. Doors and Windows

Now we've got a full drawn floor plan with every room created and every wall adjusted according to the uploaded plan! Time has come to place the doors and windows! I do this after adjusting the walls because you might risk losing some doors and windows when they're placed and you want to adjust a wall which contains a door or window. But only if you're not too careful.

If you click on the "door" icon on the construction menu a whole lot of doors, windows and other openings will appear on your library window. These items are only placeable on walls and linears. Place them outside a wall or linear and they'll just disappear. Once placed you can click on the windows and adjust their size, position, directions and you can even mirror them!. A lot of the indoor doors are the same size so you can create one that fits and copy them for the other doors. Same counts for the windows and the rest. Here is what it looks like when all the windows and doors are added! View example

7. Floors

At this time you can start with decorating your Floorplanner with all kinds of furniture if you'd like but I always change the floors first. You can add a texture to them by clicking on a floor and select the texture you want. There are carpet-, stone- and woodtextures and also some outdoors like grass, sand and bark.

There is also a possibility to adjust the color by clicking on the color button and to pick a color from the samples or use the slider to pick your own. But as the rest you can adjust this any time you desire. Click the link to see how I've done! View example

8. Furniture

Well the rooms are drawn, walls adjusted, windows and doors are added, floors are picked! It's time to put a whole lot of furniture on your floor plan! You can adjust it's size, colors. You can even group a selection of furniture by holding shift and then click all the furniture that you want to take part of the group! You can even copy this group for quick floor planning of a school or a wedding! Every furniture has different layers so some can overlap others. Rugs are for example the lowest kind of layer because they have to fit under anything else and tables and desks have an higher layer level then chairs because you need to put chairs under the tables. On the next example I've only added kitchen and bathroom furniture. View example

A few more tips:

Save regularly

If you're content with some floor plan designs you should save them every time you think you're getting somewhere. Nothing bites more then a browser that freezes without a reason when you forgot to save your floor plan! You can save every different step if you want to just like I did so you can start over from a point you're content with.

Fixing "broken" plans

When dealing with blank spaces there is always something wrong with corner points and overlapping walls. Solve this by pulling the corner points to see if other walls that were invisible come along. Just some clicking on that point should do the trick. Or pull a wall out and then back again can also work. Make sure they snap!