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Overview
Overview
As seen in our previous course, Structural Background, you should now know how to identify these 4 structures or structural characteristics:
Flat Roof
Live-In Attic
Raised Ceiling
Vaulted Ceiling
What is a floor plan?
A floorplan is a drawing/diagram of the arrangement of rooms for a single story of a building. The diagram is intended to be "to scale" (i.e., proportional to the actual size), and dimensions (length x width) of each room are included.
These floor plans, depending on the industry, may require to be complex. Luckily for us, we can simplify our floorplans a lot and do not require any structural or architectural knowledge.
General Guidelines for Floor Plans
General Guidelines for Floor Plans
In essence, no matter the type of structure, a floor plan will consist of the following three items:
Drawing of the floor plan
360° contextual photos of each room in the floor plan
Measurements of the walls for each room (length and width of the room)
You may exclude small closets and/or small restrooms. You are still required to mark them in the floor plan to avoid blank spaces.
As a general rule, the following items can be excluded from your floorplan:
Standard doorways and openings (i.e., around 3 ft wide openings in any walls)
Windows
Fixtures (toilet, kitchen sink, etc)
The floor plans have some other small specific requirements depending on the structure but you can find them below.
Flat Roof Homes
Flat Roof Homes
In addition to the general guidelines mentioned in the previous slide, floor plans on Flat Roofs are required to be on the top floor and indicate the rafters' distance (this can be obtained using a stud finder). You can see the final result above.
Vaulted Ceiling
Vaulted Ceiling
Similarly, for vaulted ceilings, the guidelines will apply. However, in your floor plan, make sure to indicate the area with the vaulted area.
Live-In Attic & Raised Ceilings
Live-In Attic & Raised Ceilings
These two structures have a similar architecture. Therefore, the floor plan for these remains the same as our General Guidelines. The example below states the floor plan is for the top floor underneath the Live-In Attic, whereas for Raised Ceiling, it will be the top floor.
In contrast to the two previous structures, as you can see, these two only require the General Guidelines with no further information:
Floor Plan - Load Bearing Walls Identification
Floor Plan - Load Bearing Walls Identification
From time to time, some Clients will request a floor plan even if the home doesn’t fall isn't a flat roof, live-in, raised, or vaulted. This is to determine if there are any Load Bearing Walls (LBW) present in the interior of the home.
For Load Bearing Walls, a floor will always be required on the top floor no matter if it's a 1, 2, or 3-story home. You are not required to identify the Load Bearing Walls. You can focus on building a floor plan based on our General Guidelines and our engineering structural team will take care of the rest.
Here's a visualization of how the floor plan helps us locate load-bearing walls. We expect your deliverable to be similar to the top-down view shown below:
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