Understanding Floor Plans: Exploring Doors, Windows, and Architectural Details

When you are looking at a floor plan, a floor plan is usually drawn as a horizontal slice about four and a half feet looking down towards the floor. So right over here is a drawing of a standard hinged door. And so you can see the gray in this area and that area.

That's the wall. This rectangle right here is the door. This area right here is the hinge point.

This is where the door touches the wall. And this is the swing over here of the door as it closes. This is representative.

We're typically using a standard width of one and a half or one and three-quarter inches for the width of the door. But we always show the hinge point and where the door closes. Then we have double doors.

With double doors, one is typically fixed or usually closed. The other is the dominant door. Just like with the single door, we have our hinge points.

And what you might see in some drawings is they might have one door shown as dashed lines in this area, which would mean that this is the door that's typically closed. Right here we have bifold or closet doors. Again, you can see the door is hinged here and it folds at this point here.

When they fold open, this area here slides over and aligns with the lower part of the door right there. Here we have a pocket door. You can see that typically what's happening as we're showing the door, pocket doors these days are usually purchased as an assembly, which has a frame that stretches from over here back to here.

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It has thinner walls assembled here and it has the track that goes above the door. But again, so here's a pocket door. It's an assembly.

You can see that it slides to the left and the right. Here is what they call a bypass sliding door. We can see the door here.

We see the direction of movement. What you'll see in some instances is an archway. So you can see the wall here, the wall here, and then this is a dashed or hidden line that shows the line of the archway or the opening above.

On this last row are different levels of details and ways of representing a window. So pretend that you're in a room and you're standing right here. Okay, this is the bottom edge of the wooden sill at the base of the window.

Right here in the middle is the glass and out here is the edge of the window on the outside of the building. If you have brick, sometimes people will show the brick that's outside right here. So again, what's happening is you're standing here.

Right in through here is the glass. Here's the bottom of the window below on the inside, the bottom of the window on the outside. This is a casement window.

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And in this example, to my mind, this is a casement window that swings inward. You can see that it's showing more detail. It's showing the jamb on this side and the jamb on the left and the right side.

So that's the wooden detail. And then you can see here that they're showing a mullion, which is an element between two window panes. And then they're also showing here the inside of the window frame, outside of the window frame, and then the window glazing when it's closed.

And then over here, a double-hung window where again we're showing the entire assembly. You less frequently see a window displayed this way than this way. The reason is the more detail you show in something like a window frame or a window jamb, the more the expectations rise that you've done the research.

And these aren't just lines, but rather they mean something in particular. And so people are more commonly using this kind of a representation. They will then have, for example, a window symbol.

The window symbol, you know, the hexagon with the number or letter, then goes to the schedule that calls out the manufacturer and the specific window so that you don't need to show this level of detail.