The following lines will walk you through the necessary steps on how to draw floor plans and blueprints for your new architectural design. Once you have chosen to draw your own floor plan or blueprint, you have to decide if you will be drafting it by hand or utilising a home design program or software.
It doesn’t really matter if you are building a treehouse, storage shed or an actual house, the key to building a proper structure is following a quality blueprint. While you might need the help of an actual architect to successfully draft all the necessary blueprints for a sophisticated project, you can by all means make your own blueprints and floor plans to design a simple project. You can use tracing paper and an architect’s ruler in order to draw these documents by hand yourself, or you can use a software or program to complete the design. Commercial design programs or software can happen to be extremely handy when producing your floor plans, engineer prints, blueprints or other architectural or engineering documents; they do require a certain level of expertise to be able to make the most out of them but as soon as you have some basic notions on how to use these programs you will see your documents looking much more professional.
First step: learning to read floor plans and blueprints
Before going ahead and making your own blueprints or floor plans, it would be very helpful for you to learn how to read these documents so you can ensure that yours has the right structure and all of the necessary information.
Floor plans and blueprints
The concepts of Floor Plan and Blueprint can at times be utilised interchangeably, but the truth is that the differences are quite significant. The original meaning of a blueprint refers to a copy technique, typically characterised by white lines on a blue paper. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a floor plan, it could actually be a drawing of a building or a house, a construction drawing, or an actual floor plan. However, nowadays a blueprint usually refers to an architect’s drawing of a floor plan most of the time.
A floor plan is a drawing that displays the layout of a property or building from above. It is actually more polished than a blueprint. Floor plans are usually used for marketing, communication and sales purposes.
Visualising the structure design
When it comes the time to visualise your own design, as you are looking at other floor plans and blueprints for inspiration, just imagine what you would like to design. Imagine the layout of the spaces, materials, placement of appliances and furniture, and also think about where you are going to place your doors and windows. Also, give some thought to how thick you want your interior and exterior walls to be. Do not forget about carefully designing entrance and hallways when producing your design.
Drawing your blueprint or floor plan by hand
Before going ahead and getting started, grab a pen and paper, and make sure you have a simple laser measure. In case you do not have a laser measure, you will still be able to create a floor plan or blueprint, it will just not be as accurate. If you do not have it, then use a standard tape measure.
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