Most floor plans start as a rough sketch on the back of an envelope, and that is a perfectly good beginning. If you can measure a room and draw a rectangle, you can produce a sketch that a draughtsperson can turn into a clean, scaled drawing in a day or two. This page shows how to measure and sketch your own floor plan, what the symbols mean, and when a home-made drawing is enough. It also explains when it is time to hand the job to a professional. Send one request and local draughtspersons quote you for free.
How to measure a room and sketch your own plan
You need a tape measure or a laser measure, a pencil, an eraser and a few sheets of squared paper. Work through the house one room at a time:
- Draw first, measure second. Sketch the outline of the room freehand, roughly in proportion, leaving space around it for figures.
- Measure wall to wall along each side, at about waist height, and write the figure in millimetres or metres on the sketch. Measure both directions, because few rooms are perfect rectangles.
- Add the openings. Record each door and window width and its distance from the nearest corner.
- Measure the wall thickness at a door or window reveal. A single brick wall is about 110 mm and a plastered cavity wall is nearer 270 mm.
- Check with a diagonal. Measure corner to corner. If the two diagonals differ by more than a few millimetres, the room is out of square and the draughtsperson needs to know.
Join the rooms by measuring through the doorways, then take one overall measurement along each outside wall to catch mistakes.
What the symbols and scale mean
A floor plan is a view from above, cut roughly a metre above the floor. Walls are drawn as thick double lines, often shaded solid. A door is a gap in the wall with a thin arc showing which way it swings, and a window is shown as a thin line set inside the wall gap. Stairs are parallel treads with an arrow pointing up. A north point arrow shows how the house sits on the stand.
Most plans are drawn at 1:100, where 10 mm on paper equals one metre in the building. Squared paper makes this easy: let each 10 mm block be one metre and every half block 500 mm.
When your own drawing is enough
A home-made plan is genuinely useful for several jobs: testing where the couch, bed and dining table will fit, comparing two layouts for a renovation, briefing a kitchen supplier, or giving a draughtsperson an accurate starting point so the measure-up costs less.
It is not enough for council. Plans submitted for approval must be drawn to a standard, show the site, elevations and sections, include the energy and fire notes the regulations ask for, and be signed by someone registered with SACAP. If you plan to build, extend or sell, see our pages on building plans and as-built drawings.
Turning your sketch into a CAD drawing
When your sketch is ready, a draughtsperson redraws it in CAD software, corrects the geometry, adds dimensions, room names and symbols, and prints or sends it as a PDF and a CAD file. Photograph each page of your sketch square-on and send it with your request; a good sketch keeps the quote down. Fees are usually about R60 to R160 a square metre for the drawings, and a simple redraw of a small house can be agreed as a fixed fee.
What to include in your request
- Photos of your sketch, taken square-on
- The address or suburb, for site visit costs
- Whether room sizes are measured or estimated
- What the drawing is for: layout, listing or council
- The file formats you need, PDF or CAD
Floor Plan Drawing for different clients
- Families building a new house: a tidy scaled plan of the family house to test furniture, cupboards and a new layout
- Owners adding or changing rooms: an accurate drawing of the existing rooms to plan walls, doors and a kitchen move
- Developers and builders: clean typical unit layouts redrawn from site sketches before the full design starts
- Estate agents, sellers and landlords: a clear, scaled plan of a property redrawn from a quick measure on viewing day
- Shops, offices and restaurants: a measured layout of a shop or office to plan shelving, desks and walkways
- Farms, smallholdings and rural homesteads: a drawing of a farmhouse or workers' cottage for repairs, with outbuildings placed on the stand
- Churches, schools and crèches: a scaled layout of a hall or crèche to plan seating, play areas and exits
- Rental and granny flat investors: a neat plan of a rental room or flat to compare layouts and brief a contractor
Frequently asked questions
Do I need special software to draw a floor plan?
What is the easiest way to measure a room?
Will council accept a plan I drew myself?
How long does a draughtsperson take to redraw a sketch?
Floor Plan Drawing by province and city
- Johannesburg
- Pretoria
- Centurion
- Midrand
- Sandton
- Randburg
- Roodepoort
- Krugersdorp
- Randfontein
- Germiston
- Boksburg
- Benoni
- Kempton Park
- Alberton
- Vanderbijlpark
- Vereeniging
- Durban
- Pinetown
- Pietermaritzburg
- Richards Bay
- Newcastle
- Ladysmith
- Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth)
- East London
- Kariega (Uitenhage)
- Mthatha
- Cape Town
- Bellville
- Paarl
- Stellenbosch
- George
- Worcester
- eMalahleni (Witbank)
- Middelburg
- Secunda
- Mbombela (Nelspruit)
- Rustenburg
- Brits
- Klerksdorp
- Potchefstroom
- Mahikeng
- Polokwane
- Tzaneen
- Kimberley
- Upington
- Bloemfontein
- Welkom
- Sasolburg