building-plan-complete-guide (how to read)
building-plan-complete-guide (how to read)
CONTENT
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
Have you ever walked to a shopping mall and were impressed by its design? Have
you ever thought of the planning that the architects and the builders did even before
they started constructing that huge building? Do you know that the building plan
might be the first drawing they must have created before finalizing everything?
As Gordon B.Hinckley said,
"You can't build a great building on a weak foundation. You must have a solid
foundation if you're going to have a strong superstructure."
In this elaborated guide to understanding building plans, we will walk you through
different types of building plans, how you can easily read building floor plans, and
how you can create a building plan for free using EdrawMax. By the end of this
guide, you will get a complete guide that illustrates different building plan symbols
and how you can share your designs on different social media platforms. However,
even before we dive into understanding building construction plans in detail, let us
start with the basic definition of a building plan and what are some of the amazing
benefits of creating a pre-construction chart for your building.
Here we will help you understand what is included in a building plan and the benefits
of creating a building plans.
It should be noted here that several different plans come together to make a
building plan. So, the parts included in a building plan differ from building to
building. However, some of the most common inclusions are:
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
• Foundation Plan: It represents the general design intent of the foundation. In
this building plan's section, you can have a slab, crawl space, basement, post,
and beams, the extent of structural slabs, and more.
• Floor Plan: It illustrates the layouts of the rooms, walls, doors, and windows.
• Roof Plan: It typically illustrates ridges, valleys, and hips. In most cases, the
roof plan of the building indicates the roofing material and slopes of roof
surfaces.
• Elevation: There are two types of building elevations: exterior and interior.
Both of these elevations can be illustrated in a building plan.
• Electrical Plan: In a building plan, the electrical plan will include the location
of fixtures, switches, and outlets, design intent, and layouts.
In addition to this, a building plan should also include some of the other important
features, like:
Just like any other plan, there are several benefits of creating a building plan. To start
with, building plans help you visualize the overall building even before you start
constructing it. This process saves time, resources, and the entire construction
team's hard work into building it.
In addition to this, there are several other important benefits of having a building
construction plan, like:
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
will also ensure that your builder and constructor will remain under the
budget.
• Avoid problems: A building floor plan will let you avoid any unnecessary
damage or problems that might happen when you start constructing the
building.
• Easy Maintenance: When you ever require maintenance of your building, it
would be great to present your engineer with the building plan. It will help
them understand what kind of fixtures you have used or the height of the
roof from the ground floor, and more.
Definition: Floor plans1 are scale drawings that show the relationship
between rooms, spaces, and physical features viewed from above
Usages: Floor Plans provide a way to visualize how people will move through
the space, walk through any challenges, and redesign before moving forward
into elaborate building stages.
Benefits: Drawn to scale, a floor plan illustrates the location of walls, doors,
and windows, as well as furniture such as kitchen cabinets, beds, night tables,
and more.
2. Site Plans
Types: Just like a building elevation, there are different home elevations, like
Front Elevation, Side Elevation, Rear Elevation, and Split Elevation.
Usages: A site plan represents how the entire property area is utilized and
the important details of the surrounding area.
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Benefits: The detailed site plan helps to maintain an open-communication
between various authorities of government for approval.
3. Millwork Drawings
Definition: Unlike site plans or floor plans, millwork drawings are used for
detailing any building project. In simple words, millwork drawings graphically
illustrate your building plans' smallest details.
Usages: Millwork drawings can help architects understand how all the
components go together. For instance, on a millwork detail drawing, one can
add the details like the frame on a wooden window.
Benefits: With the millwork drawings, you can get the information of all the
minute details that you might add to your building plan.
4. Exterior Elevations
Benefits: There are several benefits of creating exterior elevations, like cost-
efficient methods of personalized building houses, which help save time.
5. Interior Elevations
Definition: Interior Elevations are like sections in that they show all of the
heights inside the house. In most cases, interior designers use interior
elevations to illustrate the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and other important
rooms.
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
6. Landscape Plan
Usages: Landscape plans or landscape designs are primarily used to plan the
entire layout for an outdoor area of your house.
Benefits: A landscape plan helps you understand how much area you need to
dedicate to your garden, where you eventually plan drives, walks, lawns,
shrubs, and more.
Definition: A reflected ceiling plan3 is a drawing that shows the items located
on the ceiling of a room or space.
Usages : With a good RCP, you can understand the key information about the
ceiling of each of the rooms that are represented on your blueprint or site
plan.
Like any other important drawing, the building plan has many symbols that
effectively help you create the 2D design. Some of the most important building plan
symbols4 include appliances, bath kitchen, building core, cabinets, electoral and
telecom, garden accessories, shell and structure, office accessories, planting, wall,
door and windows, cubicles, etc.
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Here we have laid out some of the most important and highly used building plan
symbols that are readily available at EdrawMax.
• Doors: Door symbols5 showcase the visual representation of the doors in the
building. Some of the most commonly used door symbols are single doors,
double doors, bifold doors, and more.
• Windows: There are several window symbols available at EdrawMax, like a
fixed window, single casement window, vertical sliding window, double
casement window, bay window, horizontal sliding window, and double-hung
window.
• Stairs: There are several types of stair symbols that you can use while creating
the building plan, like straight stairs, L-stairs, U-stairs with landing, spiral
stairs, curved stairs, and winding stairs.
• Appliances: Some highly used appliance symbols are stove/range,
refrigerator, dishwasher, washer, dryer, water heater, and cabinet.
• Plumbing: Some of the most used plumbing symbols6 are floor drain, toilet,
urinal, shower, bathtub, and freestanding sink.
• HVAC symbols: EdrawMax has several HVAC symbols7, like heater, air filter, air
conditioner, return air vent, and fan.
• Electrical Symbols: As the name suggests, electrical symbols8 depict the
important electrical appliances you might use in your building construction
plan, like an electrical outlet, ceiling fan, telephone jack, switch outlet, TV
outlet, floor outlet, and ceiling light.
• Wall Symbols: Some important wall symbols can be a brick wall, plywood
finish, ceramic tile finish, poured concrete wall, wood finish, metal finish, and
framing lumber wall.
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• Doors: In the building construction plans, you can see that doors are
illustrated as the breaks in walls, with each door indicated by a short line at a
right angle to the wall.
• Stairs: In most building plans, stairs are presented as a series of rectangles
with an arrow that signifies whether they go up or down.
• Fixtures: In building plans, fixtures can be toilets, sinks, showers, bathtubs,
light fixtures, and stoves. At the same time, some of the fixtures can be
furniture selected for interior design.
Now that you have understood the basic symbols and how easy it is to read a
building plan, let us walk you through a couple of ways to understand what makes a
perfect building plan and how you can draw a building floor plan using the
traditional ways where we did not use any tool, like EdrawMax.
You might wonder what makes a building plan? Or what are some of the key
elements that you need to follow to make a technically good building construction
plan? The right-hand thumb rule of this is that a perfect building floor plan is the one
that provides the construction department everything that they might need in order
to create the building -- starting from dimensions to area layout, a building plan
should contain almost everything related to the building or the construction.
• In the building floor plan, you must always clearly label every element or
feature.
• You are using the right scale to map out the entire layout.
• The building plan design follows the instructions provided by the building
owner and, at the same time, adheres to the laws of the local government
body.
• The building construction plan should be practical to use.
• While creating the building plan, you must add the minute details that will
play a major role at the time of construction.
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
• If you have added the details outside the building area, you are only making
your building plan more technically solid for the architect or the builder.
Now that you have understood the important benefits and symbols of a building
plan let us help you understand how you can create a building plan using two
methods. The first method is us sharing the traditional method where you physically
visit the site, analyze everything, create your drawing on the paper using pen and
paper, label everything properly, and share it with your architect. Another method to
create the building floor plan is by using EdrawMax, where all it takes is a couple of
steps that will lead you to create and share your design.
Before we navigate you through creating the building plan using free software, let us
check out some of the traditional ways of creating the building plan.
When creating the building floor plan for your current project, ensure that you
always note down the right scale. Usually, people take the help of regular rulers to
scale the area. However, you should always go with an architect's scale to create the
graph of the building area. The standard scale to use is a 1/4-inch to 1-foot scale -- if
you follow this scale, you can easily create a long property on a piece of paper.
Once you have laid out the starting point, you can create the building plan by adding
the exterior lines. Along with the outline of the building structure, ensure that you
add details of the driveways, trees, and external patios. It will help the builder to
understand your requirements easily.
If you are creating the building plan for yourself, you can add some basic information
to your building plan to help the architect understand it clearly. For instance, ensure
you add the right address of the property, always add "N" for North in the right
location, the scale size, and your details.
Now that you have completed the basic outline for the building property, it is time to
sketch some of the most important details of the property, like width, depth, and
height of the building.
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
Step 5: Labeling
Since you are using a general way of creating the building plan, you depend on your
legends and labels. Ensure that you label everything related to the building
construction plan.
Instead of wasting time drawing a building plan on paper, you should look for a way
to design a building plan easily. EdrawMax9 is well equipped to design a building
plan. There are only a couple of steps that you need to follow in order to easily
create it, like:
9 EdrawMax: https://www.edrawsoft.com/download-edrawmax.html
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
A building's plan starts with understanding the building's dimensions and your
requirements. Once you have gathered the right information, you can start creating
the outline. EdrawMax comes with the architect's scale that lets you draw the real-
life design on the canvas.
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
Step3: Templates Selection
If you need to access the free building plan templates, click on the 'Templates' option
from the left panel of the EdrawMax tool and type 'Building Plan' in the search bar.
You will see hundreds of free building plan templates readily available at EdrawMax.
Click on any of these templates and start customizing them as per your requirement.
Alternatively, you can also click on 'Building Plan' on the left side of the diagram
panel. It will open up different diagram types, like Floor Plan, Electrical and Telecom
Plan, Seating Plan, etc. Click on any of these plans to work on the free templates .
In order to create the building floor plan from scratch, click on 'Building Plan,' which
you can find on the left panel of the tool. Upon clicking, you will see a list of different
'Building Plans' that you can create with EdrawMax, like Floor Plan, Home Plan, Office
Layout, etc. Click on '+' to design the building construction plan from scratch.
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
EdrawMax comes with over 50,000 vector-enabled symbols. Click on 'Symbols' on the
toolbar and head to 'Predefined Libraries.' Find the 'Floor Plan' and click on 'Building
Core' to access all the free building plan symbols, like direction, staircase, right spiral
staircase, air-conditioned location, corner handrail, etc. You can import them on the
canvas and start customizing as required. If you do not find the right building floor plan
symbol in the symbol library, you can create your symbol and save it in the library
section for future usage.
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
Straight Staircase Curved Winding Staircase Z-Shape Staircase
Staircase 1
Know more about building symbols10, and try to drag and drop the symbols you want
to customize your building plans.
Once your building plan is ready, you can easily share it using EdrawMax's special
sharing feature. This building floor plan software lets you export your file in multiple
formats, like JPEG, PNG, PPTX, PDF, etc. In addition to this, you can easily share the
building plan via email or on different social media platforms, like Facebook,
Pinterest, Line, and LinkedIn.
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
There are 4 examples of building plans that you can refer or use immediately. Just
click the image to download EdrawMax, and download the templates accordingly.
Then double click to open the templates and customize as your prefer. Or open the
templates from EdrawMax Online11 , and duplicate the templates. Click this building
plan examples12 to get more inspirations.
A commercial building plan template shows the exterior elevation and the building
floor plan in detail. As you can see from the below building plan design, the building's
width is 35'-0", depth is 34'-0". The entire building floor plan shows different areas
which are properly marked. For instance, we have a vaulted office, vaulted exercise
room, dining area, sitting area, kitchenette area, and covered porch. With EdrawMax,
you can easily create a similar commercial building plan for your project.
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
Example 2: Treehouse Building Plan
The following is a treehouse building plan showing the plan and front views. It
should be noted here that treehouse designs are elevated platforms or structures
built around, next to, or amid the trunks or branches of one or more mature trees.
At the same time, when the design for a treehouse calls for a structure with larger
spans across multiple larger trees, the designer must consider flexible structures.
Even before creating the treehouse building plan, you should always analyze the
tree's strength.
The following is the front elevation of the playhouse building plan, which gives a
perspective of the frame viewed from the front. At the same time, the playhouse
building plan also provides the width and height of the playhouse front wall frame.
The sides are 100*100 stick, and the joists are 100*50 stock. It should be noted here
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
that both skids and floor joists need to be of lumber suitable for outside use. Similar
playhouse building plan templates are readily available at EdrawMax for your
personal or professional usage.
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
The following building plan example illustrates the 3-bed floor plan with multiple
rooms, kitchen area, bathroom, dining area, study rooms, and a small landscape
area. In order to create the technically correct building plan, you should use the thick
wall symbols to illustrate the outside walls. At the same time, always add important
furniture like single-bed, double bed, writing desk and chair, kitchen cabinets, basin,
toilet, bathtub, shower unit, wardrobe, and more. Such intrinsic details add gravitas
to your building plans.
Creating a building plan is a very important process that leads to creating your
dream house. So, it is always advisable never to take any kind of risk when you start
working on the building construction plans. As you saw here, creating a building floor
plan using a general way leads to confusion and uncluttered designs. At the same
time, with EdrawMax, creating the building plan takes only a couple of steps and
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Building Plan Complete Guide | EdrawMax
minutes. In addition to this, you do not require any special technical skills to create
the building plan on this free building plan software.13
9. Final Thoughts
In this guide to understand the building plan designs, we helped you understand
how building floor plans are a graphical representation of what a building will look
like after construction. Considering the amazing benefits of creating the building
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plan, you should always consult with your architect or client about the building plan
and what they have in mind.
Creating a building plan is important, but choosing the right tool to create the
building floor plan is equally important. Unlike other tools which restrict your
creativity EdrawMax14 is one such tool that lets you create floor plan, reflected
ceiling plan, HVAC layout, security and access plan, elevation plan, wardrobe plan,
and more -- all together in one single drawing board! With this amazing wardrobe
plan maker, you ensure that your designs are perfect with the real-world dimension
and shapes, and at the same time, the closet looks great when you finally place it in
your room. All in all, EdrawMax is one of the best drawing tools to create the
wardrobe plan for your apartment, and with free templates and vector-enabled
symbols, you can never go wrong with your closet designs.
14 EdrawMax: https://www.edrawsoft.com/download-edrawmax.html
15 Building Plan Symbols: https://www.edrawsoft.com/building-core.html
16 Building Plan Examples & Templates: https://www.edrawsoft.com/building-plan-examples.html
17 How to Draw a Building Plan: https://www.edrawsoft.com/article/how-to-draw-a-building-plan.html
18 Free Building Plan Software: https://www.edrawsoft.com/building-plan-software.html
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