Home Design and Architecture Guide

What Is a Floor Plan?

A floor plan is a simple line drawing showing rooms as though seen from above. Walls, doorways, and windows are often drawn to scale.

When shopping for house plans or building plans, you may study the floor plans to see how rooms are arranged. However, a floor plan is not a blueprint or a construction plan. To build a house, you need a complete set of construction plans that will include floor plans, cross-section drawings, electrical plans, elevation drawings, and many other types of diagrams.

A floor plan, or floorplan, in architecture and building engineering is a diagram, usually to scale, of the relationships between rooms, spaces and other physical features at one level of a structure.

Dimensions are usually drawn between the walls to specify room sizes and wall lengths. Floor plans will also include details of fixtures like sinks, water heaters, furnaces, etc. Floor plans will include notes to specify finishes, construction methods, or symbols for electrical items.

It is also called a “plan” in architectural terms, as opposed to “elevation” which means how the object will look when seen from a side, or a “cross section” where the building is shown cut along an axis to reveal the interior.

Examples:
Although usually drawn to scale, a floor plan can be a simple diagram showing the layout of the rooms. The drawing shown here shows a floor plan from a single-family home