Whether you’re wanting to show the layout of a property you’re renting out in an online advert, trying out different layouts for an HMO or creating a detailed drawing for a planning application, there are many reasons why knowing how to draw your own floor plans is useful.
You may also need technical drawings of floor plans if you’re building a property, but in this case you definitely need to seek the assistance of professionals. However, in the other three situations you should be able to draw the plans yourself. Here’s a of a few of the different ways we produce them:
Magicplan – best for producing quick floor plans for adverts
The simplest and cheapest way to create a floor plan is by using magicplan, which can be downloaded free of charge from the app store. The app allows you to simply create quick floor plans by photographing all the corners of rooms in your house. There’s a small fee when it comes to exporting the floor plans, but one that’s well worth it for the accuracy and simplicity of the plans it creates. When we compared the floor plan measurements created by a laser measure and the magicplan app, they were only centimetres out.
Floorplanner – best for trying out different HMO layouts
For more detailed plans or when you want to experiment, the desktop app Floorplanner is a great tool that lets you play with different ideas. You can import data from existing floor plans into the software, whether these floor plans be from magicplan, a laser measure or another source. If you opt for a laser measure, we recommend the Leica Disto D2 Laser Distance Measure, which can fit in your pocket and is far more practical than a tape measure. Remember to jot down door and window positions too, as these are important when it comes to playing with the floor plans in Floorplanner.
*If you want to learn more about tweaking floor plans with Floorplanner, the above video contains a mini-tutorial.
Get a technical drawer – best for planning applications
Like the previous method, this process first involves collecting information about the dimensions of rooms. Instead of then importing this information to Floorplanner, the information is sent to technical drawer. They then produce a precise and detailed floor plan, suitable for planning applications. We also advise including a text description of what you want creating along with the dimensions, in order to get the best results.
Architect vs Planning Consultant
Ever since we started using planning consultants rather than architects, 100% of our planning applications have been approved. That’s much better rate of success than we had when we were putting all our money towards architects. If you can afford it, definitely use both, but if you’ve got to pick we would always recommend choosing the planning consultant.
For the drawings, we now usually use freelancer websites such as UpWork, Peopleperhour or Fiverr. We’ve found the quality of the drawings we can obtain through these websites are usually as good as those done by architects and much better value for money.