Our man with a pen tries to make a plan
Most vendors only have a dim idea of the blood, sweat and tears that go into a floor plan. And neither did Nigel Lewis until he decided to have a go himself.
There is an exception to this rule; when celebrities or Russian oligarchs submit their plans for mega basements to local councils. Then I’m all over them.
But, on the day-to-day level, I realise floorplans are important to vendors who view them as a must-have marketing tool and also immensely useful to buyers as a guide to a property’s layout.
After immersing myself in the world of floor plans recently, I now realise how much effort goes into producing them and that the agents who do prepare their own (some contract them out) must dream in little thin black walls and mini sinks. That’s certainly what I started to do.
TRAINING PLAN
But first, I asked to be trained. Overall, it went well. The session lasted about 90 minutes and then it took another three or four hours of playing with the online toolkit to become proficient.
The Metropix system asks you to begin by creating rooms on the lowest floor and once you are happy climb the house, snakes-and-ladders style. Peter Watson, Metropix.
Metropix enabled me to listen into their weekly Monday morning training session, which is done online. Peter Watson is the disembodied body you hear as the mouse flicks around your screen illustrating the trickier aspects of floor plans, such as how to draw a curved wall.
It was a homely affair. Five or six estate agents from across the UK had logged on as Peter waded through the basics of the Metropix online system. And it was very informal – one agent’s colleagues were discussing the football in the background, while Peter took a DPD delivery during the presentation. I think someone burped at one point.
This meant it didn’t feel like yet another dull training session and was more like a mid-morning meet-up at a virtual café. I enjoyed it.
PLANNING AHEAD
But despite Peter’s affable approach, this is a serious business. Before the training began I had asked how many floorplans Metropix users had created so far, and was told the nine million mark was rapidly approaching.
So I made a cheeky request that my four-bedroom Victorian semi in SW London could be the nine millionth. Fame found at last?
Sadly, by the time I’d nailed down a date for the training and had produced my first drawing, this target had been exceeded by 15,000 floor plans. That’s a lot of drawing in less than a week.
It’s also a lot of measuring. The hardest part for me was sizing up my house. I started with a cheap three-foot long B&Q model, but soon realised this was woefully inadequate when measuring an eight-metre- long room.
And then frustrated equally by my tape measure’s credible impersonation of spaghetti when extended, I popped next door and asked my neighbour if I could borrow something more professional and hefty– his CK-branded 7.5 metre boy’s toy.
As he handed over his treasured measure, he pointed out that most agents use hand-held laser machines now. I dismissed him with a disdainful ‘pffff’, saying serious agents didn’t use such silly and expensive contraptions to complete a simple floor plan. I discovered they do.
Even with a professional tape measure that’s easy to lock off and that stays straight, it took me an hour to measure my humble abode, battling ill-placed doors and the weird niches that I’d never noticed all over my house.
But eventually, the scores from the walls were in and I was ready to start.
CREATIVE PLANNING
The Metropix system asks you to begin by creating rooms on the lowest floor and then, when you’re happy with them, create any further floors above it, all of which are later linked together by stairs as you climb the house, snakes-and-ladder style.
As the training proceeded, it became clear that systems like this rely on the uniformity of the UK’s housing stock to be viable. How many millions of Victorian semis from Thurso to Penzance have the same or similar layout as mine, I wondered?
But the Metropix system is instead designed to pick up every subtlety of a home’s layout from walls that inexplicable jut out to the weird extensions many people add on.
And it can also cope with the occasional Grand Designs home and even house boats (see example) complete with curved walls and angular off-shoots.
Each room I created in my floor plan was essentially a thick-walled box, linked together by ‘holes’ in the walls to accommodate doors, windows, patio doors and knocked through walls.
It’s a demolition job from the start – which I enjoyed. You begin with a uniform set of boxes and then get a virtual lump hammer out to remodel them into the required shape and layout.
MULTI-LEVEL PLANNING
The biggest pain though, is drawing multilevel homes. Agents must love a bowling-green-flat bungalow. So much easier.
Even my standard Victorian house has six floors starting in the basement then moving up to the kitchen on the lower ground, an upper ground floor by the front door, a bedroom and bathroom on a lower first floor, two more bedrooms on an upper first floor, plus a sixth floor containing what used to be the servants’ quarters.
In theory, these floors should all be drawn separately but I think most agents don’t bother. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. For example, my home could be drawn as three floors because most buyers just want to see the general layout and approximate square footage. It’s not supposed to be used for outline planning, is it?
Peter reiterated this point, saying that flat plans are not supposed to spot on – most homes are too warped and wobbly for accurate measurement and floor plan purposes.
But for whatever reason, it took me three hours to finish measuring my small house and then draw it. But I’m slow. Peter says experienced agents could do my property in an hour, start to finish.
My one criticism of the whole process is that it still feels quite low-tech. My measurement was made on lined graph paper supplied by Metropix on which I scrawled a rough outline of the rooms. Millennials who join the industry must be horrified.
Where’s the laser-measure-linked-app thing, they must ask. I quizzed Metropix on their behalf? On the way, they said.
But one thing is for sure now that I’ve had go. The next time I walk past a branch and see negotiators staring at their screens intently without moving, I will know they are not checking Facebook, as I used to assume, but instead trying to remember which way a door opens; in or out.
And then I tried PlanUp
PlanUp differs in two significant ways to Metropix. Firstly, you download it onto your computer rather than using the system online and it’s more of a ‘drag and drop’ toolbox better suited to less experienced users, like myself.
I took 15 minutes to work out how the software worked and then needed another 15 minutes to draw my first plan (see my effort, above).
Steven Flatman at Planup said it was like building with Lego – you do a room and then add another. I’d been trying to do each property in one go. – agent Clare Higginson of Plymouth-based Open House.
Claire Higginson, 48, of Plymouth agent Open House was, like me, a floorplan beginner when she tried PlanUp, even though she’s been an agent for 30 years.
“Floorplans have become more and more common and so I worried that it could be losing me instructions,” she says.
“I spoke to Steven Flatman at PlanUp who explained the process differently to the other floorplan people I’ve tried. He said it was like building with Lego – you do a room and then add another whereas I had been trying to do each property in one go. Within 15 minutes I was flying.”
Claire has since done 30 floorplans using PlanUp and, while her first few took her an hour each to complete, she’s now finishing them in under 20 minutes. “There’s always something a little bit different about every property, but the more you do floorplans, the easier it is next time,” she says.
Claire says she struggled the most with hallways and landings, but Steve says the trick is to build the rooms first, and then the hallway takes shape naturally as the rooms are built around it.
Steven Flatman commented, “One of the key advantages of PlanUp is that you don’t have to take your rough sketch back to the office with you and then start drawing. Our floorplans can be drawn even when there isn’t any internet,” he said. A good point if you’re in an unoccupied property.
Floorplan Suppliers
- www.floorplanz.co.uk
- www.metropix.com
- www.photoplan.co.uk
- www.planup.co.uk
- www.simplyinventories.co.uk
