Floor plan maker

How to draw a floor plan with measurements

1. Measure each room at floor level, wall to wall, with a tape or a laser measure: the inside width and length, and for an L-shaped room each wall in turn. Skirting boards make a few millimetres of difference; ignore them.
2. Pick your units (m, cm or ft-in) and type the width and length, then tap Add room. The next room you type is placed against the right-hand wall of the last one, one wall thickness away, so rooms that share a wall line up. Drag a room to move it; it snaps to the grid.
3. For any other right-angled shape, tap Draw and tap the corners in order on the grid (10 cm, or 6 in in feet). Each wall is kept straight across or straight down, and its length shows as you drag. Tap the first corner again, or Close room, to finish.
4. Or trace a picture of a plan: tap trace a photo or PDF of a plan on the empty drawing, or Open a picture or PDF under Trace a picture, and pick a PNG, JPG or WebP (a screenshot of a listing's plan, or a photo of a paper plan taken straight from above) or a PDF, whose first page is used. Tap both ends of a wall whose length you know, ideally the longest one, and type its length; the picture is scaled to fit the grid, and the first point you tapped lands on a grid corner. Turn the picture by 90° or by half degrees until its walls run along the grid, fade it with the opacity slider, then tap Draw and tap the corners over it.
5. Correct a wall by typing it: in Move, tap a wall's length label and type the measured length. Only the corner at the end of that wall moves, so the walls you already got right stay where they are.
6. Add doors, windows and openings: pick one and tap a wall. Drag it along the wall to where it is; tap it to type its width, flip the side it opens into or move its hinge.
7. Add furniture: pick a piece in the Furniture panel, type your own width and depth if you have measured it, and tap Add to plan. Drag it into place; within about 14 screen pixels of a wall it snaps flush. Tap it to turn it 90° or 15° at a time, resize it or delete it. A piece that runs into a wall, another piece or a door's swing is outlined in red with a one-line note under the plan.
8. Save: a PDF at a true scale to print (check the 5 cm or 2 in line with a ruler), a PNG to send, or an SVG to open in a drawing program. Print furniture cut-outs makes a separate PDF of every piece at the same scale, to cut out and move round the printed plan.

What it cannot do

• It is a 2D sketch with no 3D view, and not an architect's or surveyor's drawing. Do not use it for planning permission, building work or a sale's legal floor area; those need a measured survey.
• Walls are lines with one thickness for the whole plan. There is no structure, no stairs, no roof, no ceiling heights and no separate thickness for outside walls.
• It does not find the walls or rooms in a picture by itself (no AI). The picture is only a guide under the drawing; you tap the corners over it yourself.
• A traced plan is only as true as the picture. The scale comes from the one wall you set, so a plan drawn out of scale, or a photo taken at an angle (a paper plan shot from the side), gives wrong lengths elsewhere. Check one more wall against a length you know; if it is out, the picture is distorted and that wall needs typing in by hand.
• A PDF opens at its first page only, drawn as a picture of up to 2400 pixels across, and HEIC photos open only where the browser turns them into JPG. In a saved file the picture is cropped to the box round your rooms.
• The furniture is generic shapes, not any shop's products. A bed is a rectangle with pillows, a sofa a box with arms; there are no makes or models to pick from.
• The sizes are typical, so measure your own. Each comes from the source named under the picker (bed sizes are mattress sizes; a frame is usually a few cm bigger). Type your piece's real width and depth before you rely on a fit.
• Clashes are checked flat, on the floor. Heights are not known, so a low piece under a window or a wall unit above a door is not caught; wall units are only checked against walls, door swings and other wall units. Clearance to walk round a piece or pull out a drawer is not checked, only the door swing. Dining tables include their chairs pulled out 300 mm.
• Drawn rooms have right-angled corners. Typing a new wall length moves only the next corner, so that wall's neighbour can end up slanted; a curved wall or a bay window cannot be drawn.
• The PDF uses a standard font, so a room name in a script other than Western European letters prints with ? in place of those letters. The PNG and SVG keep them.

How the areas and the scale are worked out

Every length is kept in millimetres, whatever unit you see, and converted only for display: 1 in is exactly 25.4 mm, 1 ft is 304.8 mm and 1 sq ft is 0.09290304 m². So a 4 m wall reads 4.00 m, 400 cm or 13′ 1.48″ (157.48 in), and switching back and forth never moves a corner.

A room's area comes from its corners with the shoelace formula: add up x₁y₂ − x₂y₁ for each wall round the room and halve it. It gives the exact area of any outline whose walls do not cross, L-shapes and U-shapes included. A worked example: a room 6 m wide and 4 m long with a 2 × 2 m corner taken out (a chimney breast or a cupboard) has corners at (0, 0), (6, 0), (6, 2), (4, 2), (4, 4) and (0, 4); the formula gives 20.00 m² (215.28 sq ft), the same as 24 m² minus 4 m². Its inside perimeter, the length of skirting board it needs, is 20.00 m. Areas are inside areas, measured to the inner face of the walls, which is what flooring, paint and heating sums want.

A scale says how much smaller the paper is than the room. At 1:50 every 50 mm of room is 1 mm of paper, so a 4 × 3 m room prints as an 80 × 60 mm rectangle; at 1:100 it is 40 × 30 mm. The imperial scales are named the way US plans are: 1/4 in = 1 ft is 1:48 (that 4 m wall prints 83.3 mm, 3.28 in) and 1/8 in = 1 ft is 1:96. An A4 page at 1:50 holds a plan about 8.9 × 10.9 m including the walls when upright, or 13.2 × 6.6 m turned sideways; the page picks whichever fits. When the plan is too big for the page at your scale the tool says so and offers the next smaller scale rather than shrinking it quietly.

Furniture sizes and the cut-outs

Bed sizes differ by country, and a plan drawn with the wrong one can be more than 20 cm out. A UK double is 4 ft 6 in × 6 ft 3 in (137.2 × 190.5 cm, National Bed Federation), a European double is 160 × 200 or 180 × 200 cm, and a US queen is 60 × 79.5 in (152.4 × 201.9 cm, International Sleep Products Association); the panel has all three sets, from Wikipedia's bed-size tables. The other pieces use the furniture schedule in the Mayor of London's London Housing Design Guide (2010), the sizes new London homes had to be able to fit: a three-seat sofa 1850 × 850 mm, an armchair 850 × 850 mm, a double wardrobe 1200 × 600 mm, a bath 1700 × 700 mm, a toilet with its cistern 500 × 700 mm, base units and a cooker 600 mm deep. Wall units are 12 in (305 mm) deep, bookcases 26–31 cm, and a round table for four is at least 100 cm across.

A cut-out is the piece's outline at the plan's scale. Worked example at 1:50: that UK double prints 1371.6 ÷ 50 = 27.4 mm wide and 1905 ÷ 50 = 38.1 mm long, and a four-seat dining table, 1200 × 800 mm plus chairs pulled out 300 mm each side, prints 24 × 28 mm. At 1/4 in = 1 ft (1:48) the same bed is 1.125 × 1.5625 in. The cut-outs print in rows, biggest first, each labelled with its name and size, on as many A4 or Letter pages as they need, with the same 5 cm or 2 in check line as the plan.

Questions

How do I draw a floor plan with measurements for free?

Measure each room wall to wall at floor level, then type its width and length here and tap Add room, or tap Draw and tap the corners on the grid. Every wall shows its length, each room shows its area and inside perimeter, and the total floor area is shown under the plan. Add doors and windows by tapping a wall, then save the plan as a PNG, an SVG or a PDF at a stated scale. There is no account and the plan is never uploaded.

How do I work out the area of an L-shaped room?

Draw its outline corner by corner and the tool adds up the area for you with the shoelace formula, which works for any outline whose walls do not cross. By hand, split it into two rectangles: a room 6 m by 4 m with a 2 m by 2 m corner missing is 6 × 2 = 12 m² plus 4 × 2 = 8 m², 20.00 m² in all. Its inside perimeter is 20.00 m, the same as the 6 × 4 m rectangle around it.

What does a scale of 1:50 or 1/4 inch to the foot mean?

At 1:50 one centimetre on paper is 50 cm in the room, so a 4 m wall is drawn 80 mm long and a 4 × 3 m room is an 80 × 60 mm rectangle. At 1/4 in = 1 ft a quarter inch on paper is one foot, which is 1:48. The PDF prints a scale bar and a 5 cm or 2 in check line; measure that line after printing, and if it is not exactly 5 cm or 2 in the printer scaled the page, so print again at 100 % or Actual size.

How do I make printable furniture cut-outs at 1:50?

Draw the room, add each piece from the Furniture panel and type your own sizes, pick 1:50 under Save and print, then tap Print furniture cut-outs. Every piece prints at 1:50, labelled with its name and size: a UK double bed, 4 ft 6 in by 6 ft 3 in (137.2 by 190.5 cm), becomes a 27.4 by 38.1 mm rectangle, and the plan of a 4 by 3 m room prints 80 by 60 mm, so the paper pieces can be moved round a printed plan at the same scale. Print at 100 % and check the 5 cm line with a ruler before you cut.

How do I make a floor plan from a picture of one?

Tap Open a picture or PDF and pick the plan: a screenshot of an estate agent's listing, a photo of a paper plan taken straight from above, or a PDF (its first page is used). Tap both ends of one wall whose length you know and type it. If the 3.60 m kitchen wall is 288 pixels long in the picture, one pixel is 3600 ÷ 288 = 12.5 mm, and the picture is scaled so the grid is true. Then tap Draw and tap the room corners over the picture. Check a second wall against a length you know: a plan drawn out of scale or a photo taken at an angle gives wrong lengths, and the tool cannot tell.

How do I convert room measurements between metres and feet?

One inch is exactly 25.4 mm, so one foot is 304.8 mm and one square foot is 0.09290304 m². A 4 m wall is 157.48 in, which is 13 ft 1.48 in; a 4 × 3 m room is 12.00 m² or 129.17 sq ft. In this tool every length is stored in millimetres, so switching between m, cm and ft-in any number of times never changes the plan.