Floor Plan Grid

Grid paper set up for room sketches

Five-millimetre squares in grey, a heavier line every five squares, and a border round the drawing area. Nothing else, because a floor plan sketch does not want anything else on the page.

Pick a scale before you draw anything

This is the step people skip and then regret, usually about the time the kitchen runs off the edge of the paper.

At 1:50, one small square is 25 cm and a bold block of five is 1.25 m. A room 4 m across is sixteen squares. That is the scale to use for a single room.

At 1:100, one square is 50 cm and a bold block is 2.5 m. A whole flat fits on A4. Detail suffers, but you can see the layout.

At 1:20, one square is 10 cm, which is what you want for a kitchen run or a fitted wardrobe where 10 cm is the difference between a door opening and not.

Write the scale on the sheet. A drawing without one is a picture, and in six months you will not remember whether that wall was three metres or four.

What the bold lines are for

Alignment. Walls drawn along the heavy lines stay parallel and square without a set square, and a run of five squares is a countable unit that stops you losing your place across a wide room.

Start the outside walls on bold lines. Everything inside then has something to measure from.

Sketching a room that will actually be right

Measure the outside walls first and draw the shell before anything else. Rooms are rarely as rectangular as they look, and discovering that after you have drawn the furniture is a wasted sheet.

Mark doors with the arc they swing through. A door that opens into the space where you were planning to put a bookcase is the single most common thing a paper plan catches, and it only catches it if the swing is drawn.

Note the windows, the radiators and the sockets. All three constrain furniture and none of them are movable in an afternoon.

What is under your control

The 5 mm grid with bold fives is the preset. Paper size A4, US Letter or US Legal.

US Legal is worth considering for a long room — the extra length often means one sheet instead of two taped together.

Other cell sizes, colours and dot grids are on the graph paper generator, which is the same engine with the controls exposed.

Printing

100% scale, or the squares are no longer 5 mm and the whole scale calculation is wrong. Worth checking with a ruler once per printer.