Once I realized that I was missing some floor plans, I set out to draw some new ones. It’s pretty easy, but I’ll show you how to draw floor plans in case it’s not something you’re familiar with.

How To Draw Floor Plans

Tools

I showed the tools in my last post, so I won’t recap too much, but it’s graph paper, a scale rule, mechanical pencil, a square, and a measuring laser.

Process

I start out with a right angle in the lower left-hand corner of my page. It helps a lot that my house is a rectangle, so I don’t have to do much thinking. I draw a right angle to get started. Next I figure out my scale. I’m drawing in 1/4 scale, since my house is ~40′ x ~ 25′, it means that my drawing will be around 10″ by 6″, since every foot equates to 1/4 inch. The scale rule is a long ruler that is a triangle in cross-section. It has 12 scales (4 to a face), so you can draw floor plans like this in 1/4 in scale, and then detail sections in 1/2 in scale, or in 1″ scale. For this effort, all I need is a basic 1/4 scale.

Here is a detail of a scale rule. Each side mixes four scales – in this case 1/4 inch and 1/8 inch are interleaved on top, and 1 and 1/2″ scales on the bottom. The large numbers are the 1/4 scale, and they are counted from the right. To the right of the 0 are gradations of 12, so that you can measure the inches. In order to measure, 2’6″, you put the 2 at your starting point, and measure past the 0 to the middle large tick mark.

This means that unless you are drawing with a needle, you can’t get too specific in 1/4 scale. I just put things in 3″ increments,  and if I need to get super-precise, I use a bigger scale.

 

 

Once I have my right angle, I draw the box that will be my plan. In this case, my house has a main ‘box’ that is the brick part, and an addition (at the top) that is somewhat separate. Then I drew a center line to show where the roof ridge is. I did this because my attic has eaves, and the room is in the middle of the attic, and while I could measure the width of the attic, I didn’t feel like crawling into the eaves to measure their depth. I just decided to center the room on the roof ridge.

When I have my box done, I work from one corner to draw out the room. The laser measure is invaluable for this. Instead of messing around with tape measures, you just butt the laser against a wall, aim, and shoot. A novice can do this floor plan in about 1/2 hour, and having a floor plan around is hugely useful. Other than a WiFi survey, which is less common, you can size rugs, estimate paint, arrange rooms, and tons of other stuff. Again, having a bunch of floor plans of your house is really useful.

I have a theory about this, and I wrote a long post about this I haven’t published. My theory is that it’s hard to have a conversation when you have one abstract that depends on another. If you are talking to your significant other about how to arrange your living room and you’re not in the living room, you have to hold two things in your imagination: the living room, and the proposed change. With a floor plan, you have a concrete thing to point at, then you can just imagine the change, and you remove one abstract item.

Finally We’re Ready!

I spent the past two evenings doing these floor plans, so now I have the plans, I’ve imported them into NetSpot, and I’ve done my surveys. Next post I’ll show you the results. Hopefully it showing how to draw floor plans was helpful.

If you’re wondering why I’m bothering with this, the reasons are twofold: First, I’d like to find out if this expense is worth it. I find my self going back to the ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ maxim. I just want to see for sure if this was worth it, as far as my investment is concerned. Second, I wanted to understand my problem better. I got my current WiFi working with luck and brute force; I bought Access Points until the problem mostly went away. Now, I want to optimize it.

What I’m listening to as I do this:

Exodus. These guys were part of the original Bay Area thrash scene with Metallica, and Slayer, and, in fact, it was Kirk Hammett’s band before Metallica. They were a staple on HeadBangers Ball, but I only started to listen to them recently. They have been around intermittently since 1979, and even their new stuff is great metal.