Measuring above the skirting boards
The tape then runs along the skirting rather than the wall, and every room gains three to four centimetres. Repeated over six rooms, the plan no longer closes.
Guide
The plan of your home, in an hour.
The method fits in six steps. It works with a pencil as well as on screen — the screen only spares you the arithmetic.
An accurate plan does not require any drawing talent: it requires measuring in the right order, and not lying to yourself about wall thickness. Here is the routine used by people who survey homes every day.
The six steps
Walk through it freehand first
Start with a sketch without measurements, room after room, in the order you walk. The point is not accuracy but topology: which room touches which, where the doors are, which way they open. A wrong measurement can be fixed; wrong topology has to be started over.
Measure walls, not rooms
Take each wall corner to corner, with a laser meter if you have one, a tape measure if not — tape on the floor, against the skirting board. Write centimetres down without rounding: a room announced as “three metres” is 297 or 304, and the gap shows on the finished plan.
Record openings and where they sit
For every door and window, three numbers are enough: width, height, and the distance from the nearest wall corner. That third one is the one people skip — and without it a window ends up in the middle of a wall where it never was.
Write down the thicknesses
A load-bearing wall, a partition and a dry lining are not the same thickness, and that is what makes a plan add up or not. Measure them in a door reveal, where the section is visible. Failing that, a common partition is 10 cm and a load-bearing wall 20.
Draw it, then check the totals
Transfer your measurements wall by wall, then check: rooms plus partitions must add up to the outside length, within a few centimetres. Beyond five centimetres of drift, one measurement is wrong — almost always a wall taken skirting to skirting instead of corner to corner.
Dimension it, then export
A plan with no dimensions and no areas cannot be handed over: the other person will read a drawing, not a document. Add wall dimensions, the area of each room, the orientation and a scale. Then export a PDF — that is the format that will still open for everyone, ten years from now.
The five mistakes that keep coming back
Forgetting partition thickness
Accurate rooms separated by lines with no thickness produce a home smaller than the real one. This is the mistake that distorts total areas the most.
Rounding to the nearest ten centimetres
Every rounding costs a few centimetres, and they all lean the same way. Write down the number you read; rounding can happen on screen if you insist.
Dimensioning the room but not the openings
A door with no position cannot be placed back by anyone else. Three numbers per opening, always: width, height, distance to the corner.
Drawing without stating the scale
A plan with neither scale nor dimensions is no longer a plan: nobody can take a measurement from it, and it only serves the person who drew it.
Common questions
No, a five-metre tape is enough for a flat. A laser saves time and avoids skewed measurements in large rooms; under 80 m², the difference is mostly comfort.