How to Create a Floor Plan | For Interior Designers

hey everybody this is me me I've been posting some floorplan challenges on my Instagram and I thought it might be fun if I did one with you today this video is going to be a complete step-by-step tutorial of how I develop a floor plan of course every project is different but there are general rules of thumb that I apply to every project as the complexity of the project increases so does the complexity of the floorplan development that being said I wanted to start out easy today with a simple residential project just that everybody can get

the fundamentals down and get on the same page and as I walk you through my process I will point out ways in which you can take it to the next level if you want to as a disclaimer I am an interior designer with a degree in interior design a lot of these principles are taught and interior design programs as well as in interior design textbooks they are applied by most professional interior designers today so they are tried and tested and guaranteed by me to work so let's get into it here are the supplies that you

will need along with some optional tools and if you don't have anything I will try to list some alternatives first up is a pen or pencil pen will show up better under tracing paper the pencil erases so pick your poison a sharpie or a fine black marker would work alcohol-based markers being alcohol-based instead of water-based means you can blend them and you can mix colors to create your own shade kopecks are my personal favorite as you can tell but Prisma colors are a close second and a cheaper option kopecks are expensive but they are refillable

sticky notes are preferred but you can also just cut up a piece of paper into squares it doesn't need a stick but it's just helpful eight-and-a-half by eleven paper or any scrap pieces will do tracing paper my favorite is just the pads but you could also get a roll it comes with fifty yards which is amazing and way more economical but it's just really whatever you prefer drafting tape or dots I prefer the tape because you can rip whatever size you want but dots are great too they're easier to use they're easier to reuse than

the tape if you don't have either of these try to use a low stick masking tape architectural scale I don't have my beautiful metal one today so we're just stuck with this 100 year old yellow one please just ignore that we will use the 1/8 of an inch and also the 1/4 triangle or straight edge some people don't know this but you're actually not supposed to use your scale to draw lines it's only to measure so you're gonna need something else to draw with the most useful is a translucent triangle so you can clearly see

where you're drawing no pun intended and you can also make sure that everything is square now for the optional tools a blank criteria matrix and I say this because you can print them out from online or type up a blank one yourself in Excel and print it out but you can just as easily draw it right now on a white piece of paper AutoCAD if you want to transfer your floor plan to the computer I prefer to do this because you can make every line very precise you can import furniture into it plus I like

to render the floor plans and photoshop afterwards from the AutoCAD PDF file but you can also scan your hand-drawn plan into Photoshop and render that or just hand render it with a Copic markers templates are very useful for quickly drawing furniture shapes toilets bathtub circles doors pretty much anything the ones I recommend our furniture plumbing squares and circles make sure you're using the right scale the most popular being 1/4 and 1/8 and last but not least --velum --velum is basically a step up from tracing paper it's smoother it's thicker better quality and more expensive it's

usually reserved for the final floor plan versions but you don't need a waste vellum on all the iterations that we'll go through at the beginning that's what the tracing paper is for so those are the supplies and let's get into step 1 aka the program the program is going to be a set of info data observations in criteria for any given project normally the interior designer will receive part of the program from the client and they will have to gather the rest themselves for this example I gave the program on my Instagram post our project

today is for the average size single-family home in the US our program tells us that it's 2700 square feet 45 feet by 60 feet and this is the interior measurement we can assume the exterior walls are six inches thick it is a single-family home one-story and the garage is detached our requirements one foyer / mudroom if you have room than do both if not then combine them one living room one dining room one kitchen minimum two bathrooms minimum three bedrooms and one laundry / utility room because I am ambitious I want to try to fit

in office a powder room and a breakfast nook as well for all of my challenges you can always include more than the requirements just not less okay now onto the criteria matrix and adjacencies this is just a way for us to organize our data into an easy-to-read table first column is going to be project name with rooms going on the first column square footage needs and I included the averages adjacencies and we will circle the immediate ones public-access y for yes and for know some people do three and they do a semi but I just

wanted to keep it easy with two options daylight sash views acoustical privacy plumbing and lastly special equipment for the project name we will write average size single-family home in the US and I wanted to include some other columns that you might want to add on other projects you can do sustainability factors or special considerations at the bottom it's also helpful to write your total available square footage just so you do not go over filling out the table is pretty self-explanatory the four-year slash mudroom does need public access there doesn't need to be views no acoustical

privacy and no plumbing and of course no special equipment living room we do want it to be next to the dining room so we'll write number three kitchen four and thirteen powder room I do want the powder room to be near at the living room I'm in a circle number four because I do want it directly next to the kitchen that's gonna be an immediate adjacency the other ones are just sort of public access yes daylight slash views yes acoustical privacy no plumbing no and no special equipment you guys can kind of see how this

is done and this is going to change from person to person not every designer is going to have the same opinion of what needs to be next to each other same with what the client wants so this is going to look different for every single person [Music] we'll have the kitchen close to the living room the dining room the breakfast nook and the powder room out of those adjacencies we can then circle the immediate ones being the living room the dining room and the breakfast nook public access yes daylight slash views yes acoustical privacy no

plumbing yes and for special equipment we can list the appliances you can just write appliances or you can list them out whatever you prefer you guys can get the gist of this so I'm just gonna speed this up and a time lapse for you and again you don't have to do exactly what I'm doing if you have a different opinion of what needs to be public what needs daylight maybe you think the bathroom does need daylight then go ahead and do it and one easy way to check yourself to make sure you have the adjacencies

correct make sure that if you list like say what for number two if you list number three then make sure number three that your listing number two some people like to group the like rooms so for example you can put bedroom and bedroom together I personally like to break them up because I like to remember that there's two spaces but you can just as easily put them together and write bedrooms as long as they're exactly the same and like I said I will give you guys some tips if you do want to make this a

little more advanced if you do then I would include maybe three different options for each column so for public access do yes semi and no same with daylight slash of use maybe for the bathroom you do want a little bit of a window but it's not crucial that there's a view or daylight then you can do semi you can completely customize this table and make it as informative and complex as you want the most difficult column out of this entire table is going to be the square footage needs normally I have that blank and I

have to fill it in myself with the number that I think each room needs but I wanted to make this easy and give you guys an average just so you can know kind of what to aim for and that is the completed criteria matrix next up we have a relationship diagram it might look scary but all it is is a visual representation of our criteria matrix so go ahead and grab your sticky notes and a sharpie or if you don't have that some cut up pieces of paper and a black marker what we're gonna do

is we're going to draw a circle for every room in our project starting with the mudroom and that's just going to include foyer to make it easier the two things we're going to look for our daylight slash views and acoustical privacy this one has neither so we can go ahead and rip that off and stick that on our table next room is living room obviously that's going to be a bigger circle because it is a bigger space in our project this one is going to have views so we're gonna do these little arrows in the

corners of the sticky note to indicate it does need a view there is no acoustical privacy so we can go ahead and rip that off next up is dining room this one's going to be a fairly large space as well it is going to need views just like the living room no acoustical privacy is we can go ahead and rip that one off and what we're doing is we're gonna put it next to the other space that it has an adjacency to so dining room and living room we want them together we're gonna stick them

next to each other on the table kitchen is gonna be another large circle we do want views no acoustical privacy and we want it next to the living room in the dining room you guys can probably get the gist of this now it's kind of like a game which is why I really like it bathroom does have acoustical privacy and the bathroom is not going to be next to the kitchen or dining room or living room so we're going to put that off to the side so the master bathroom as well as the master bedroom

are both going to have views and acoustical privacy they are going to be next to each other they are immediately adjacent so we're gonna put them next to each other on the table but gym one that's gonna be next to the bathroom bedroom two is going to be next to the bathroom and bedroom one they're both going to need views and acoustical privacy now the laundry room is going to be next to the both bedrooms and the master bedroom so as you can see I'm kind of just trying to fit this in a way that

makes sense with my information one thing to look out for is grouping the acoustical privacy's so as you can see the living room the dining room the kitchen they do not need acoustical privacy's they're gonna be louder spaces there's gonna be more people talking it's okay if people hear you talking so it's ideal to group the spaces that need acoustical privacy and the space is the dome the office is going to have views but it's not really next to anything in particular powder room is gonna be next to the living room the dining room and

the kitchen as you can see this is actually really tough it might look easy but it's not easy at all you have to make everything work what I'm doing now is just playing with the rooms playing with the adjacencies and trying to make it work in a sense that all the adjacencies are near each other the rooms that need views are kind of near the exterior you don't have to necessarily think like a floor plan at this stage you just have to make the information makes sense your job as the interior designer is basically to

make sense of this puzzle that is the project and just to reiterate because it is so important you do not need to think rectangular or square or like a floor plan at all at this stage you just need to make the adjacencies work and try to group the acoustical privacy's that's it it's almost like you don't want to overthink it at this stage you just want to make sense of the puzzle now you're gonna want to grab a sheet of your tracing paper ideally this would fit on top of all of your circles I normally

do this on small sticky notes just so it fits but I wanted to do it larger so that it would show up on camera a little bit better so in this case I'm actually just gonna draw circles on my tracing paper and just mimic what I have going on the table but ideally what you would do is just copy the circles so if your tracing paper is large enough or if your circles are small enough then go ahead and do that you can use your circle template if you have one if you don't it doesn't

really matter it doesn't need to be perfect circles I'm just doing it because I'm used to it and this part is pretty self-explanatory we're just gonna transfer what we have on the table onto our tracing paper I like to use a sharpie because it shows up it's thick it's easy to write in but you can do marker you can do pen whatever [Music] and it's not necessary but I think it's useful to draw circles in the relative size that is compared to the other spaces so like my breakfast nook is going to be kind of

medium-sized kitchen living room dining room those are going to be large master bedroom other bedrooms are gonna be large it'll help you in the next stage if you get this as close to reality as possible so once you have those circles done you're going to grab your criteria matrix and you're gonna see what type of adjacencies these circles have with each other so according to my criteria matrix the living room and the dining room have an adjacency but not an immediate one so I'm going to do one line between them the living room and the

kitchen have an immediate adjacency I circled it so that one's gonna get two lines and again you can make this your own you can do a thick line for immediate you can do a squiggly line whatever you want this is just what I like to do living room and powder room have an adjacency dining room and kitchen have an immediate adjacency so like it's a double line and this is where you can really see how accurate and efficient your setup is I recommend that you do three different criteria matrixes for each project that you do

this forces you to think outside of the box look at the project differently because sometimes you get stuck with the very first way that you look at something so try to do three of these and then choose which one is your favorite now for the fun part grab two markers if you don't have kopecks you can use highlighters markers colored pencils whatever I like to choose two colors that look different from each other you're going to turn your tracing paper around draw two squares on the back and then turn it over and you're gonna label

them red for me is going to be public and yellow is gonna be private if you want to do three categories and have a semi public or semi-private then go ahead and choose three colors the trick here is to color your circles on the back this way it doesn't bleed or blend with the sharpie or pen or whatever you're using and it's also just a tad bit lighter than if you were to draw on the front at this stage if you want to get creative you can kind of shade your bubbles you can do whatever

you want for me I just colored them solid now the whole point in coloring the public and the private spaces is to see if you've grouped your spaces correctly we don't want to mix in a bunch of private spaces in the middle of public spaces and vice-versa so as you can see I did a pretty good job here I have my yellow on one side and my red on the other now one thing you don't want is you don't want your lines to intersect you don't want the adjacencies to cross that means that one space

you're gonna have to cross through another space possibly or around another space to get to the one that it's supposed to be next to so try your best in these relationship diagrams to have no lines intersecting I know that seems impossible sometimes I can't do it but just try your best now I'm just adding in the daylight slash views arrows just to make sure that my rooms that need views and daylight are kind of towards the outside of my relationship diagram it looks like we did a pretty good job at that and of course it's

really important to label your entrance so I'm putting a little double arrow here at my mudroom slash foyer and I'm just gonna write entry because this is a residential house it's going to need another entry slash exit probably next to the kitchen slash breakfast nook so I'm just going to add a little arrow there just to remind myself and indicate that there is another exit now you guys know the drill I'm going to add the acoustical privacy's to the rooms that require it if you have three categories for acoustical privacy's and you have a semi

than just color half of the circle [Music] okay so now we're checking double lines crossing we don't want that we have our squiggly rooms which are acoustical privacy's together we have the colors grouped which is public and private we have views all on the outside this looks good and now we can go to the next step now that we have completed our criteria matrix and our relationship diagram we can put that aside now grab some drafting tape or drafting dots and you're going to stick the floor plan down to the table if you don't have

the floor plan print it out you can easily draw it describe your architectural scale and our building shell is going to be 45 feet by 60 feet once you get that stuck down to the table you're going to put a piece of tracing paper on top and if you're gonna be using sharpie or anything that bleeds I recommend putting some paper underneath all of this just so it doesn't damage the table and like my Instagram post said the north is where you want it so don't worry about sunlight at this point so now we are

ready to do the bubble diagram step 1 grab your triangle and trace the building shell try to make sure every perpendicular line is exactly 90 by using the sides of your triangle always remember to write this scale on all of your drawings so in our case we're doing one eighth of an inch equals one foot zero inches now using our relationship diagram we're basically going to draw this diagram as bubbles inside of our building shell at this point you don't really need to be concerned with circulation space and the exact size of the rooms you

just want to make the bubbles fit [Music] [Music] [Music] go ahead and grab another piece of tracing paper and tape it down and now we're ready to do the block diagram just like with the bubble diagram we're going to trace the shell with our triangle trying to keep all of our lines square the aim of a block diagram is to square off your bubbles and try to make it a little more realistic a little more like real rooms so what I'm doing here is I'm just kind of squaring off the shapes and just defining them

a little bit better at this point you can also start to determine your circulation space by developing some hallways and spaces to move around you'll see as we go through this process that with every single step it's going to look more and more like an actual floor plan I'm going to grab my Copic markers and I'm just gonna color in my circulation space just to designate where my hallways are going to be I'm going to use my red in my yellow to indicate private and public spaces [Music] I'm gonna color it on the back just

like I did before so that I can write on the front and none of the colors are going to bleed [Music] once I've done that I'm gonna label my rooms once again at this point I'm going to remove the bubble diagram underneath just so I can see my block diagram a little more clearly [Music] once we've finished the block diagram it's time to figure out proper room sizes and that is an entire topic in itself it's way too complex and complicated for me to completely explain to you in this video so I might have to

do a separate one but for the time being I'm just gonna show you two quick ways to go about it because we're doing a really simple residential plan it's actually pretty simple because we know what size spaces we need we live in a house we live in a home and we know what size the bathrooms are supposed to be we know what size and good dining room feels like so you can go off of your intuition and experience for this but on top of intuition what you can do is you can draw out all of

the furniture that's going to be in each space once you've done that you can calculate the total square footage that the furniture takes up and you can add some circulation space on top of that and once you add that furniture area plus the circulation space you can get a good estimation of the room size once you've calculated what size for an insurer you need in each space you can actually cut that out into individual rooms and configure that into your floor plan and try to work it kind of like a puzzle piece to make them

fit I find that to be a little limiting because you might not have a perfectly square room or a perfectly rectangle room so what I like to do is I like to get in my head an idea of what each space needs so for example the dining room I want to be able to fit an eight person table so for me I'm gonna draw that out here using my furniture template at 1/8 of an inch and I'm gonna calculate about how much space that table is gonna take up on top of that I can calculate

ok I want about 3 feet around each chair to make it comfortable and from that you can tell about how big you want each room to be if you guys remember from our criteria matrix I did include the averages for certain types of rooms in the average American household so you can use those and just go completely off of that as you can see here I did about 17 feet by 10 feet which gives me about 170 square feet for the dining room and if you look at our criteria matrix the average is 200 so

that makes sense that fits it doesn't have to be exactly this but it'd give an idea from this you can take your block diagram and start fitting in furniture from there you can kind of rework the walls move things over and you can start seeing how the space is going to shape up at this stage don't worry about exact dining tables exact sofas that you want to use it's not time to spec it's just an estimation for how big each room needs to be try to make your circulation space aka your hallways at least 4

feet 3 is the minimum but I think that's just a little tight even for is tight but for now at least try to keep 4 feet my entry door is gonna be 3 feet wide 36 inches and all of my interior doors I'm just gonna do 2 foot 8 4 now at this stage I'm not too concerned with wall thickness they're going to be 4 enough inches thick plumbing walls will be 6 inches thick exterior walls I'll probably draw it 6 but right now I'm just kind of blocking out the rooms and still trying to

figure out how I want my floor plan to actually be set up so I'm not gonna be concerned with that I'll add that in at the end some other things to be concerned with your bedrooms you probably want to keep away from the front ideally I wouldn't even have bedroom 1 with a view of the front but I couldn't figure out a way to fit it on the back or the side so try to keep your rooms towards the back try to keep your more public places towards the front and the kitchen I always like

to have at the back of the house I just don't really like cooking what I'm looking at a side yard or a front so just certain things like that try to think about just use common sense especially if you want like an open floor plan which I do so I want my kitchen to have a good line of vision to the living room even to the breakfast nook the dining room pretty much all of the big public spaces and now for some general space planning tips you want to choose an orientation that takes best advantage

of sites views features and breezes so for example closets and garages should face the worst views and be positioned to block heavy winds this won't be relevant on this project because we don't necessarily know which ways north it doesn't really matter we're just concerned with the layout but in general it's good to know circulation paths through rooms should be avoided so for example you don't want to have to get to a bathroom by going through a bedroom or an office or something else bathrooms should be convenient to all rooms in a one-bedroom house so if

there's only one bathroom you want to make sure everybody can get to it easily halls should be kept short and to a minimum they should not occupy more than 10% of the plans total area as you can see on my plan I try to keep my hallways to a minimum you definitely don't want them to be redundant and just unnecessary living rooms should not have through traffic to other rooms for example if you want to get from the kitchen to the dining room in my floor plan you can actually go in the hallways you don't

have to walk through the living room the main outside entry should not open directly into the living room a hall or four year should act as a buffer and this is something that a lot of houses fall victim to and it's not necessarily their fault there's just no room for a foyer or a mudroom but if you can fit it in I definitely would when locating doors consider swing directions and furniture placement and residential construction exterior doors should swing into the house and into the room from a hall they should be able to open completely

and this is because if you're walking down the hallway you don't want a door to open and hit you if for some reason you're tight on space in a certain area you can also use pocket doors bifold whatever you want you can get creative just don't think that just regular swinging doors is your only option [Music] be careful with toilets from the center of the toilet there should be 18 inches to the wall [Music] I don't know why I drew the exterior doors in the back swinging out it's definitely wrong we all make mistakes but

I will refine that later on now for Windows I think this is a really good stage just start figuring out where you're going to have your windows a lot of times the same sized windows are going to be used throughout the same project and that's to avoid just doing a bunch of random size windows it keeps consistency it makes the build easier and it's also cheaper so I just chose two four and six foot windows I'm going around the entire house and I'm figuring out where I want those windows to be I want them centered

on the important things like the kitchen sink maybe the beds so some things to keep in mind here you don't want the bathrooms to have too big of Windows you want to keep privacy in mind also think about what you want it centered on so if you want a window to be perfectly centered on the dining table pay attention to where the table will go also with beds and kitchen sings things like that at this stage it's kind of hard to think about the exterior but you also want to keep that in mind you don't

want to create a house that's going to look completely crazy from the outside so try to keep a little bit of consistency and just be smart with your window choices [Music] so as you can see here I'm just kind of doing some notes to myself I'm showing where the plumbing walls are gonna be and that's just because I want to remember to make those walls thicker than the rest plumbing walls are about six inches thick if you can you want to put plumbing walls together so just keep that in mind it's just gonna help save

space in the house and make the plumbing easier you can see that I could have lined my powder room plumbing wall up with the bathroom wall behind it but I'm just torn because in general you don't want a toilet to be in complete view right when you open the door so I'm just torn between that and doubling up the plumbing walls you kind of have to choose but I decided in the end it was more important for me to have the powder room wall laid out the way that I wanted to i've squiggled out the

walls that I want to keep open I want my living room dining room breakfast nook and kitchen to all be open the lines were there primarily just to keep my spaces separated but as you can see in my next iteration on top of this there's not going to be walls their kitchens can be tricky if you're not familiar with kitchen design that can be a little hard so for now just try to get your main appliances on there your hood with range or cooktop and oven a refrigerator a sink dishwasher microwave and always try to

fit a pantry a full-height pantry in the kitchen to be safe I would do 48 inches of circulation between the island and the cabinets in the kitchen you can have your lower is at 25 and a quarter with countertop and your uppers will be 14 or 13 inches deep one little trick that I like to do is I like to make note for myself what things I want to be on Center so this just helps because an AutoCAD I can make absolutely sure that they are directly on center and it's just something that you don't

want to forget about because it's something that would look so awkward in real life if it wasn't centered so for example I want my dining table to be centered on the window in the dining room I want my kitchen sink to be centered on the window I want my island to be centered on the range I want my master bedroom and my other bedrooms to be centered on their dressers and also their windows it's little things like that that make a huge difference and you really need to pay attention to once you're comfortable with your

floorplan you can start designating different flooring and this is something that I really love because it's where you start to really see it come alive so I have three general floorings that I'm gonna use carpet tile and wood I'm going to use different patterns to indicate what flooring is going to be in what area at this point you can also start to draw in rugs you want to keep with standard rug sizes 8 by 10 10 by 12 whatever you think works in each space you can use your architectural scale and really figure out what

type of rug would be best and then you can add that into your rendering obviously this is not the end I will show you guys what it looks like after I render it but I just wanted to show you how I really get to this point how I decide where the rooms are where the windows are where the doors are how much circulation space I have what size rooms there are and obviously this is not perfect it's nowhere near perfect I want to add closets to the two bedrooms I want to add more storage everywhere

else there are certain things that are the wrong size are not perfect but it's just to give you a general idea of how this process works some things I really hope you guys can take away from this is first of all it takes so many iterations it takes days it takes so much analysis and coming back and refining and refining and refining there is constantly things I want to change and add and perfect and make better it's a process it's not gonna happen overnight and it's not gonna happen immediately but what I love the most

about this entire process is that every single person's floor plan will be different even if 100 people have the same exact program that they're using the same exact building shell the same client the same restrictions everything every single one will be different because every person has a different point of view they have different creativity and I absolutely love that here is my final rendered floor plan I drew this in AutoCAD and rendered it in Photoshop if you would like to see how I do either of those things comment or like or give me some type

of message that you want to see that and I would be more than happy to make that for you I really hope this was helpful I hope you learned something new and one final message I am not perfect nobody's perfect there's not one specific perfect way to do this there's some things that I do that just make no sense but in my head it makes total sense so do it works for you this is a creative journey this is an artistic thing so make it your own and don't worry about what everybody else's looks like

just make it make sense to you [Music] you