Feng Shui – HOW to Draw an Accurate Floor Plan
Drawing a Floor Plan
In Feng Shui, it’s very important to have an accurate house plan of your main floor in order to determine which rooms of your house fall into particular Bagua squares. This month our Feng Shui Club has been drawing floor plans.
I had a problem in my house. I wasn’t sure if I had an extension, or two missing areas. So I really needed an accurate plan. Living in Morocco, and our house having had several previous owners and additions, we have no blueprints. So I had to draw my own.
I learned quite a bit from drawing my own floor plan. I ran into several problems, and now I have the advance solutions for those drawing problems.
1.) Draw a sketch of your rooms (you may have to tape together about four sheets of typing paper to get a workable size.
2.) Go around with your approximate drawing, and measure each room inside, on every wall. Note your results on your plan.
Important: Don’t forget to measure the thickness of your walls–both interior and exterior. If you forget about this, the inside and outside measurements of your home will not add up correctly. This was the biggest problem I encountered. Don’t forget to measure closet thicknesses.
3.) Find some graph paper, and again, you might have to glue (better than tape, and doesn’t interfere with drawing) up to four pieces together. The graph paper I used has half-centimeter squares (about quarter-inch squares), and I found it worked well. Use pencil, as you will most likely need to relocate some of the lines you make in incorrect places.
4.) Determine your scale, and mark it in the corner so you don’t forget. Most likely the floor plan will take several work sessions, and if there ends up being a time lag between work sections, it’s surprising easy to forget your scale.
5.) Do NOT start by drawing the exterior walls of your home. I made this mistake, and later had to move both an exterior and several interior walls! Instead, start with the exterior wall you want to put on the left side of the paper, if you are right handed. (If you are left-handed, start with the exterior wall on the right side of the paper.) It will be much easier this way (take it from a handwriting expert).
6.) After drawing your first exterior wall to scale, draw a second line to indicate the thickness of the wall. (You might find your exterior walls thicker than your interior walls, and thicknesses of walls in your home might vary, particularly if your home is constructed of masonry instead of wood.)
7.) Next draw the entire first room on that side. Check your work. Add more lines indicating wall thickness, and then add on the subsequent rooms. Keep moving until your last walls are completed. Then draw the thickness of your final exterior walls.
8.) Once you are sure it is really perfect, spray it with ladies’ hairspray to fix the pencil in place. Once you do this, it’s permanent–it can never be erased.
9.) Later, if you want to make it look really nice, you can shade the thickness of walls you’ve indicated with the side of a pencil lead. Then, fix it in place with hairspray.
Madame Monet
