Learn How to Draw Plans by Hand

Drawing plans by hand is the simplest means of creating something that describes your ideas into a format you can share with others. Plans are the universal format to discuss houses and buildings, where they sit on a building site, how big the building is, where rooms are to go, and how big those rooms are to be.

The great thing about drawing by hand is that it’s something anyone can do. If you can underline a word on a page you can draw a plan. Let’s take a look at what you need to draw and the types of drawing you can do, from loose sketches to straight line plans.

What you’ll need to draw

Since we all learn to use a pencil and pen to make marks on paper and how to measure with a ruler early in life we inherently know how to use them. Computer drawing programs, however, require significant amounts of money to purchase and time to learn how to use them. These basic items we already know how to use allows you to get started quickly on creating plans.

Let’s take a look at what you’ll need for drawing plans:

Paper: You need something to draw on or to use as a guide. My suggestion is to get some grid paper. Grid paper is good to use as a guide for drawing rooms to scale and to draw generally straight lines when needed. A few options:

• Standard pad grid paper: Standard letter-size grid paper is easily available. I suggest using a 1/8 inch grid (8 x 8 squares per inch), which allows you to use either the 1/8 inch equals 1 foot or the 1/4 inch equals 1 foot drawing scales which are most common for plans. Metric should use either 2 millimeter or 4 millimeter graph paper; 1 and 5 millimeter grids are also available if easier for you to use. If you want larger sheets but only have letter size you can always tape together two or more sheets, aligning the grid lines.
• Large sheet (architectural) grid paper: Various sheet sizes are available in pads or groups of sheets. 17 inch x 22 inch with 8 x 8 squares per inch is a good sheet size. However, make sure the length and width of your intended house can fit on the sheet at the drawing scale you’re going to use. 1/4 inch equals 1 foot scale is most common for plans, so a 17 inch x 22 inch sheet allows for a maximum plan limit of less than 68 feet x 88 feet
• You can find a variety of grid paper on Amazon or specialty retailers such as DraftingSteals and gsdirect.

Tracing paper: Architectural tracing paper in a roll is a great item to have. You can lay it over grid paper to reference sizes for rooms, and can overlay multiple sheets to create variations on plan ideas without having to start from scratch each time. This paper comes in yellow (canary) or white, and rolls of 12, 18, or 24 inches in width. 12 inches is easy to handle, and 18 inches works well with the 17 x 22 inch grid paper. Either size or color works well.

• Available from Amazon or specialty retailers such as DraftingSteals and gsdirect.

Pencil: All you really need is a standard Number 2 pencil, and preferably an electric pencil sharpener as you’ll need to sharpen often.

If you want something a bit fancier you can get mechanical pencils with refillable leads of various thicknesses, which gives you options for different line thicknesses without having to sharpen a pencil.

Pens: Pens are a great way to draw dark lines while you study ideas by sketching. At first you’ll want a felt tip pen with a thick tip. You’ll then move to using felt tip pens with medium and narrow tips as you start to refine plan ideas.

Sharpie has a really good series of pens with various thicknesses for sketching and drawing, including a good thick point which is hard to find with other brands. However, know that it’ll get all over your hands when sketching on tracing paper, often creating smudges on the paper when you put your hand back down onto the paper. You can minimize this by putting a piece of paper under your hand as you draw.

The ink is somewhat easy to wash off your hands, though, especially if you have a nail brush to scrub with.

Rulers or drafting scales: Rulers are easy to come by, and in the U.S. the inch is broken down into 16 segments, allowing you to use a variety of measurements to represent a foot: 1/16 inch, 1/8 inch, 1/4 inch, etc. However, trying to count these measurements across the ruler gets tricky and tiresome.

Architectural drafting scales are a great alternative to rulers, as they have different drawing scales representing actual distances in feet across the length of the scale. This makes counting lengths much easier, and they’re relatively inexpensive.

• You can find drafting scales on Amazon, and at DraftingSteals or gsdirect.

Sketching

The biggest mistake people make when starting out creating ideas for plans is trying to draw straight lines at specific lengths. STRAIGHT LINES AND SPECIFIC LENGTHS ARE TERRIBLE AT THIS STAGE, so don’t even try.

Instead of drawing straight lines, use loose sketching for the early phases of design. Sketching is a fun, quick, and more effective way to play with ideas and layout options. Sketching keeps your mind free from trying to draw specific things so that it can look at a series of bigger ideas and opportunities. This will lead you to better plan and design ideas.

Sketching does not mean artistic, so don’t worry about making drawings that are pretty. These drawings should be messy, with loosely drawn circles or rectangles hovering next to or overlapping each other. Remember, KEEP IT LOOSE.

Sketching concepts

When creating plans you need to first sketch out ideas, called concepts by architects. They tend to use what are called bubble diagrams to start ideas.

These bubble diagrams use circles, ellipses, or rectangles to quickly create options for the placement and relationships of the rooms in a house. There are no walls, no doors, nor any windows at this stage. It’s a study of where things might be placed in relation to each other. The bubbles are not specific – no pure circles or specifically sized rectangles. They are blobs of spaces at this point.

Be sure to create at least 3 or 4 different concepts before committing to one or two for further study.

Sketching plans

Once you find one or two good concepts you want to study, you’ll start sketching plans.

Again, remember what we are calling this – sketching. Keep things very loosely drawn. However, instead of bubbles you’ll start to loosely draw the spaces to the general size you want.

You’ll begin figuring out things such as where stairs could be placed, how rooms could be accessed, which rooms could get special ceilings, where closets might go, simplistic concepts on how the kitchen might could be laid out – showing counters and islands only at this point, how furniture might be placed, and some general ideas for bathroom layouts.

This is also the stage where you’ll need to start thinking in three dimensions – how the house will be formed vertically, both inside and out.

Keeping things sketchy and loose will allow you time to create more than one plan if you’re studying more than one concept. It’ll also allow you to make multiple iterations of a plan, using tracing paper overlays to work out different ideas and opportunities.

Drawing Initial plans

Once you get a plan kind of how you want it, you’ll next draw an initial plan. This is where you start drawing more controlled lines of general lengths representing the room sizes you want. The lines will still be drawn by hand, but the looseness becomes more controlled as you use the grid lines to place your walls and show lengths.

This is when you start showing such things as:

• Likely placement of furniture in the rooms
• Placement and basic size of stairs
• Likely locations for wall openings between rooms
• Likely placement of doors and windows.
• Location of fireplaces
• Which rooms might have special ceiling features and what would likely be
• General locations where appliances and bathroom fixtures could go
• General locations for mechanical and plumbing equipment and initial thoughts about how ductwork and piping could be routed through the house.

Keep going through the plan and refining your ideas until you feel they are “right”. This will then become the basis of more refined plans, but not the end of refinements to the plan.

Create detailed plans with controlled drawing

You can create pretty good detailed plans using just pencils or felt-tip pens on tracing paper over grid paper. Detailed plans are where you start getting specific.

This is when you start to show:

• Specific wall placement
• General wall thicknesses
• Specific room sizes
• Cabinetry and appliances per intended styles and sizes
• Bathroom layouts with cabinetry and fixtures
• Intended placement of furniture in the rooms
• Stairs showing the actual number of steps you’ll need between floors
• Locations and sizes for wall openings between rooms
• Specific locations and intended sizes of doors and windows
• Placement, size, and layouts of fireplaces
• Which rooms have special ceiling features
• Locations for mechanical and plumbing equipment and intended ductwork and piping routed through the house.
• How lighting will work in each space, including the intended locations of light fixtures.
• Where you think you’ll need and want electrical outlets to be placed.
• What types of flooring you’ll want in each space, and where they would transition from one material to the another.

Once you have things drawn how you want them you’ll start adding general dimensions and any notes needed to describe what things are. This plan will then become the basis for your final plans.

This is the plan you’ll use to confirm what you want and where it goes. The plan won’t necessarily be final just yet. You’ll be showing the most likely way things will be laid out. These could be adjusted as you continue refining the design of the house inside and out and creating any details you’ll need for the house.

Create detailed plans with drafting

Plans that are drafted are very specific drawings that use very straight lines with everything shown to the size it will be constructed. For many people these plans would be created using a computer drawing program. However, these can be drawn by hand with a little effort.

These plans should be placed on architectural sheets. These sheets have uniformly placed borders and title blocks on each sheet, and are available in a variety of standard sheet sizes. Materials for the sheets are a translucent paper called vellum, or a plastic sheet called film. I suggest using vellum paper for most people who want to draft their own plans by hand, as it works best with pencil drafting.

Drafting a plan requires accuracy. Since most people don’t have an old-fashioned drafting table and drafting equipment, you’ll need a simple way to draw these plans.

Using grid paper under vellum sheets, or better yet vellum sheets with a printed grid, is a great way to maintain control and reasonable accuracy. In order to do this you’ll need a few more items:

• Vellum drafting sheets of an appropriate size with pre-printed borders and title blocks. These come plain or with a pre-printed grid. This paper will be somewhat expensive, especially since there is no longer high demand for it. You can find this at DraftingSteals and gsdirect. Amazon has some limited size options.
• Drafting tape or drafting dots if you don’t get vellum sheets with printed grids on them. The tape or dots can hold both the grid sheet and vellum sheet in place while you draw. The advantage of drafting tape or dots compared to masking tape is that they’re designed to be removed from the paper without ripping it. You can find these at Amazon, DraftingSteals, and gsdirect.
• Triangles: Triangles are used by architects to draw straight lines and lines at 30, 45, and 60 degrees. These are often made from clear plastic so that you can see what is under them when you use them. I suggest getting one or two sizable ones such as an Alvin (or similar) 30 degree and 45 degree triangle at 10 and 12 inches. Again available at Amazon, DraftingSteals, and gsdirect.
• Protractor: If you think you’ll need to draw angles beyond those of the triangles a protractor is what you need. You can find them with school supplies or at the same places noted above.
• Erasers: You’ll need to erase things every so often. Get a large eraser like you’d get for school. Also make sure you have a smaller eraser as well such as what you find on a pencil.

To draw a drafted plan you’ll use a triangle to draw lines on top of or parallel to the graph lines, using an architectural scale to place lines in the right location to match the dimensions you need for any room or component. You’ll need to be careful to make sure you’re drawing parallel to the grid lines.

One trick to draw lines parallel is to measure at two points from a grid line or a reference line you’ve already drawn. Place one tiny dot close to each end of the intended line you want to draw at the distance you need. You can then use these two points as a reference to align your triangle and draw the straight line. This will take a bit of getting used to, but it won’t take long.

In addition to accurately drafting all of the items listed in the previous sections, you’ll need to show many more dimension and notes to describe what’s going on. Since notes can make a drawing congested, architects typically use what are called key notes.

Key notes use numbered symbols on a plan that tie back to a listing of notes elsewhere on a sheet (the key notes). Each symbol has a number placed in it to represent a specific note, and that number can be used in multiple locations where that note is needed.

You can use different symbols to represent different types of notes, such as a square for architectural notes, a triangle for appliances, a hexagon for electrical, etc. Each group would have its own set of key notes.

You’ll also need to add other special symbols, such as arrows indicating where elevation drawings can be found, and section symbols showing where building and wall sections are located. Details are indicated by another symbol that shows where to find an enlarged drawing of that condition.

A major challenge is to place all of this information so that it’s organized and legible on the plan. It will take some effort, and you’ll likely have to erase and relocate some things as you go, but it’ll be worth it to get it right.

All graphic images and photos are by Cayl Hollis