If you ever have seen a blueprint of a home or building, you probably have seen a scaled floor plan. Architects and interior designers are trained in creating scaled floor plans so that people who are not trained in the field of design can get a better understanding of their plans. Learning about scaled floor plans will give you a much better idea of how and why scaled floor plans are created.
Understanding Scaled Plans
Scaled floor plans are drafted, or drawn, so that a design for all the rooms in a home or office can be viewed when drawn or printed on paper. Using different scales, or ratios, such as 1:50 or 1:20, these metric ratios are used to create floor plans relative to the actual size of the room or space. This simply means that a scaled floor plan that uses a ratio of 1:50 uses 50 mm on paper for every actual one inch. Rooms and furniture will be drawn using this scale.
Tools and Materials
Floor plans that are drafted by hand are created using a scale ruler. A scale ruler differs from a regular ruler in that it has a triangular shape instead of being flat. A scale ruler is marked with a range of paired calibrated scales including 1:1/1:10, 1:2/1:20, 1:5/1:50, 1:100/1:200, 1:500/1:1000 and 1:1250/1:2500. The architect or interior designer would then draw the floor plan using the desired scale on drafting or tracing paper using a mechanical pencil, which is used with lead of different grades and sizes, and furniture stencils.
Computerized Plans
Not only may scaled floor plans be drawn manually on paper, but using computer software as well. AutoCAD, of which CAD stands for Computer Aided Design, is probably the most popular software used for design in general. It can be used to create two- and three-dimensional scaled floor plans. Another software that can be used to create scaled floor plans is Microsoft Office Visio. Both offer a list of visual templates for creating floor plans such as choices of furniture and shapes.
