A floor plan is not a picture of your house. It is the instruction set your builder will price and build from — and once you approve it, it speaks for you. Most clients approve plans they have only admired, not read. The gap between those two shows up later as revision rounds, change orders, or a wardrobe the door bangs into. Reading a plan takes about ten minutes of method. Here it is.
Find north first
Every proper plan carries a north arrow, usually near the title block. Orient yourself before judging anything else, because the sun does not negotiate: east-facing rooms get morning light, west-facing walls take the afternoon heat. A kitchen you love on paper reads differently once you notice it faces the four-o’clock sun. If there is no north arrow, that is your first question answered — ask for one.
Understand the scale — then test it
A plan at 1:100 means every centimetre on paper is one metre of built house. But the honest way to calibrate is not arithmetic, it is comparison: take a tape measure to the bedroom you sleep in tonight, note its size, then find a room of similar dimensions on the plan. Now the whole drawing has a familiar unit. The furniture drawn on the plan is to scale too — that bed symbol is a real 1.5-by-2-metre object. If the walking space around it looks tight on paper, it will be tight in the house.
Learn the three line languages
- Thick double lines are walls — the plan is a horizontal cut through the building at waist height, and walls are what the cut passes through. Thicker usually means external or structural.
- A quarter-circle arc is a door swing — it shows exactly which way the door opens and what it sweeps past. This is where plans quietly fail: doors that collide, doors that open against the light switch, doors that turn a corridor into a chicane. Trace every arc.
- Triple parallel lines in a wall are windows. Check each room has them where you expect, and check what each one faces — a window onto the neighbour’s boundary wall is technically a window.
Read the numbers, not just the shapes
Dimensions on Kenyan drawings are in millimetres: 3 600 is 3.6 m. Two kinds matter to you. Room dimensions tell you whether your existing furniture fits. Circulation dimensions tell you whether the house moves well — corridors should be a metre or more, and every labelled area (“Bedroom 2 · 12.4 m²”) is a number you can compare against rooms you already know. If a room on the plan is labelled smaller than the bedroom you measured earlier, believe the number over the impression.
Walk the plan like a day in your life
This is the single most useful exercise. Put your finger on the front door and live a Tuesday: come in with shopping — how far to the kitchen, and through what? Send a guest to the toilet — do they pass a bedroom door? Carry laundry from the machine to the line. Walk from the master bedroom to a crying child at 2 a.m. Host twelve people at Christmas — where do they sit, and where does the overflow go? Any journey that feels awkward traced by a finger will be awkward for the next forty years.
Before you approve, check five things
- Every door swing traced, nothing collides, nothing blocks a path
- Every bedroom has a window, and you know what each window faces
- Your actual furniture — bed sizes, the sofa you own, the fridge — fits the labelled dimensions
- Storage exists: wardrobes, a store, somewhere for the ladder and the suitcases
- The verandah and outdoor doors face the way you will actually live — evening shade, morning tea, the direction of the view you paid for
Then ask, in writing
Good questions are specific: Which way does the bathroom door swing? What is the corridor width? Where does rainwater from this roof go? Which walls are structural if we extend later? An architect worth their fee answers happily — precise questions are how they know you have actually read the drawing.
This is also how Chimbuko draws: every room labelled with its area, every dimension in real millimetres, door swings and window positions on the canvas — and when something reads wrong, you say so in plain language and watch the plan change. Practise on a sample plan, or see how a brief becomes a drawing.