Floor Plan Template

About the Floor Plan Template

When you’re in the business of building or designing houses, offices, or other spaces, you’ll fall back on the floor plan when you need to make key decisions. The floor plan provides you with a bird’s eye view of a space, whether that be of the entire floor or just a single room.

Floor plans can be as detailed as you want them to be and might include measurements, appliances, furniture, dimensions, or any other salient information. They’re accessible to everyone interested in designing or re-arranging a space but are used mostly by architects, engineers, builders, and designers. In these professions, floor plans are integral to visualizing the work they intend to do in a space.

What is a floor plan?

For builders, designers, engineers, and architects, most projects begin with a floor plan. The plan is a scaled diagram of a building, floor, or room. 

The floor plan will provide the worker with an overview of the space from above. It can be simple, showing just the various rooms and their measurements, or it can be more fleshed out. The more complex plans can go into detail and outline some of the following elements:

• Specific appliances in each room

• Connections between the rooms

• Electrical wiring of the space

• Any furniture 

• Direction of foot traffic flow

• Dimensions

The choice to fill out either a simple or detailed floor plan template will depend on what your goals are. 

For some, simply visualizing the space and the measurements of each room might provide enough information to move ahead with a project such as installing appliances or creating new spaces. Others may need to see more information, such as foot traffic flow if the building in question is a supermarket and the idea is to rearrange the layout to optimize sales.

If you are interested in how people may move around the space you’re working with, you can use the Spaghetti Diagram Template to visualize the flow of people accurately. This can be used in conjunction with the floor plan to build a clear picture of the space and how people will navigate it.

A floor plan is a powerful tool for developing an action plan for a construction or interior design project. What’s more, the plan doesn’t only serve to inform the contractor, but it can also be easily understood by a homeowner looking to make renovations or a store owner with ambitions of rearranging their store layout.

By creating a plan, you can also anticipate challenges with the project and identify a budget, the resources you’ll need, and a timeline for completion.

Create your own floor plan

While it might seem like you need a certain level of expertise to create a floor plan, the reality is anyone can do it with the right floor plan maker. Miro’s online whiteboard is the perfect canvas to create and share your very own plans. 

Get started by selecting the Floor Plan Template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.

1. Use shapes to create objects in your room. The template already has shapes you can use, copy, or rearrange.  

2. Make your model to scale. If you’re modeling an existing building, take measurements of individual walls, doors, appliances, and furniture. Whether you’re a seasoned interior designer or a homeowner looking to redesign a room, it’s important to have accurate measurements of the space. You can use the squares on the infinite canvas to represent units of measurement to fit everything to scale (e.g., a foot, a meter, a yard).

3. Add architectural features such as doors, windows, and appliances. Use shapes or even images to visualize them in your floor plan.

4. If necessary, add in more furniture. Double-check to make sure the furniture is to scale. 

Tips to make an effective floor plan

So you have the template and the tools, but what exactly goes into an effective floor plan

Here are some factors you should consider if you want to create a detailed plan for an upcoming project such as a home or room renovation, an office upgrade, or a store layout change:

Get specific

When creating a floor plan, less is often more. The last thing you want to do is waste your time drawing up a plan in which 80% of the rooms aren’t relevant to your project.

Figure out exactly which area you need to draw, whether it be a room or an entire floor, and this will save you time. You can think of this process like zooming in on the area you want to change or optimize.

Use accurate measurements and dimensions

You won’t make any progress if you aren’t able to base your decisions on accurate measurements and dimensions.

As such, it’s important that you take measurements of the existing floor before you start the new floor plan. If it’s a hypothetical plan for a floor that doesn’t yet exist, then you can think about what measurements and dimensions would make the most sense.

Consider individual rooms

There’s a lot more that goes into the design process for an individual room than you might at first assume. While it may appear as if the most important features are the doors, windows, and furniture, these are just the surface-level design elements to consider.

Dig deeper into interior design, and you’ll find that how a room ‘flows’ is just as important as furniture or appliance placement. For example, if you’re sitting at an office desk that looks out the window but has been placed behind the door, this could be jarring whenever someone enters the room.