A Brief Introduction to Drawing Elevations and Designing Your Own House Plans

One of the first steps towards building a house is creating a house plan which is to be used as a blueprint in construction. A house plan consists of many components such as a floor plan, roof plan, elevation, building sections and electrical plans. In this blog, we will be introducing how you can draw your own elevations for your house plan.

To be able to draw elevations, it is important that you have the floor plan ready. The elevations will show what your house will look like from all the sides with the perspective flattened out. This will be crucial for builder and concerned governmental authorities to ensure that the local building code is being followed in the construction.

What Do Elevation Drawings Show

Elevation drawings reveal many important components of the house including but not limited to - Walls of the house and their height, Dimensions of the roof, visible portion of the foundation, windows and gate and their dimensions, exterior features such as balconies, courtyards, and staircases, visible portion of the foundation, roof finishings and finished ground level.

Materials Required

You can choose between using a software for making your elevations, or drawing them out manually. There are free as well as paid software available on the internet for drawing house plans, but the software often come with a learning curve. Alternatively, you can hand-draw the elevations on paper. For doing that, the most basic materials you need are a ruler or an architect’s scale, plain paper, black graphite pencil, colored pencils, eraser, protractor, T-square, adjustable triangle, compass, tracing paper, masking tape and utility knife. For greater convenience in drawing, it is better to have a mechanical pencil with leads and an erasing shield for ensuring that you erase only the part that you want to.

You also need a flat, hard surface to work on such as a table. Also ensure that you are working in a well-lit space.

Steps for Drawing Elevations

Mentioned below briefly are the steps that you need to follow for drawing the elevation for your house -

To draw the elevation of the same scale as the floor plan, tape the floor plan to the table and tape a plain sheet of paper directly above it or below it in an edge-to-edge manner.
Draw a main floor baseline using the walls in the floor plan as a reference. Draw dotted lines with pencil as a continuation of the walls on the floor plan because these will be erased later.
Now, place window and door outlines within the walls. Make sure that the measurements of the length and breadth of the windows and their distance from the edges of the wall is in the same proportion as you in your actual house.
Next comes the drawing of the roof. If the roof is sloping down the wall, then the roof overhang will have to be calculated first before it is depicted in the drawing.
Now, show the basement, crawl space, chimneys, parapets on the exterior if any.
Now, fill in the texture of the roof, walls and other features to show the material that will be used in their construction. Also, show elements such as door knobs and locks.
Finally, draw the porches, staircases, gutters and downspouts.

These steps for drawing the elevation of a comprehensive house plan will be discussed in detail in the blogs to come.

Introduction to Drawing Elevations and Designing