Drawing a 2D floor plan

To begin a 2D floor plan and SketchUp, you'll need to set the view to Floor Plan. And then make sure you do not try to change the view other than using Pan. Additionally, you'll need to set up some boundaries to draw the floor plan. We'll do that using the rectangle command and the tape measure tool. And we're basically set up with that so if we're going to go ahead and do Pan. If you notice here, if you hit on the mouse wheel, you end up getting rotate and what will happen is that you're going to get a disorientation going.

If that happens, you'll have to come up here to the View toolbar. And then go back to top in order to reset the view. Let's take a look at what our floor plan is going to look like. This is the retail space that we're going to go ahead and create. We'll be following and putting in some of the details as we go along in the exercises. But, right now, what we're going to do is we're going to draw the shell, and a couple of the private offices, and where the bathrooms are. At this point we're ready to go ahead and get started. So what we're going to do is we're going to pick up the Rectangle command and start it.

And then come over here, we're going to draw a rectangle. And as do that, if you look down on the lower right hand corner where it says dimensions, we can actually go ahead and put in the dimensions that we need. So I'm going to put in 76'. Five inches, comma, by 22 feet and then hit Enter. And what should happen, is you'll end up getting a rectangle that's been made into a face. Go ahead and hit the Select button up here to kind of get out and then zoom in by using the mouse wheel, very carefully, so you can see more of the view.

Once you have that done we're going to now go ahead and offset this rectangle six inches. So we're going to come over and find the offset command, which is right here. You pick it. And then come over and you should get a little red dot that's going along the perimeter. Pull on that and you'll see it comes out. Again, go down to the distance box which is in the lower right-hand corner and type in six for six inches. And I'll go ahead and create, basically, your set of outside walls. Hit the Select tool again.

Now if you notice, if we go ahead and select these objects here, that they are on the current layer called walls. So, everything is on the walls layer. Including this face which is actually going to represent our floor. So, we're going to to go ahead and change that and make sure that it is on the floor layer. So, we're just going to come in there and put it in on the floor. Okay, next what we're going to do, is we're going to pick up the tape measure tool and we're going to lay out, by using this tool, where our walls are going to be.

So, I'm going to come over here on the edge. And I'm going to pull over here 27 feet, seven inches, then six inches going this way. Just put in six. And then we're going to put in 12 feet. Another six inches. 12 feet again. Six inches. So now we have two offices going vertically, we have to come up with the horizontal dimension here which is going to be ten feet, five inches, so put in ten feet, five.

And then six. So now we have our construction lines kind of lined up. You can see here that we have the area so I'm going to pick up the pencil tool. I'm going to zoom in a little bit so my inference when I start drawing won't be jumping around. So I'm going to come over here and pick these points and I'm going to pick out the outside first. And I'll pick up the inside. We'll just kind of come over there. Then I'll pick up this guy here. And this one cell. Now let's kind of zoom out again and hit Select. Now we've got these lines drawn I don't need these construction lines so I'm going to do a right box around here and then hit the Delete key in order to get rid of them.

Like so so now we have these two offices made. Next set, we're going to come over here and do where the two bathrooms are using the construction tool as well we're going to come over here and make this one six feet six inches. And then pull out six inches. And then, bathrooms are seven feet, so we're just going to put in seven feet. And that's six inches there, another seven footer, and another six inches. So we'll come over here and hit Select. And we'll kind of zoom in on this area, as well.

Pick the pencil tool and we'll just go ahead and draw the walls here as well and as you can see we're going to go ahead and kind of finish this off. There we go. So now, all we need to do is get rid of these construction lines too, so I'll do a selection tool. And I hit the Delete on both, and there we have it. All right. The only thing we might want to do is kind of clean up some of these intersections. If you notice here, I have a little spot there where we could do a little wall cleanup.

We'll go in here and take out these little sections here, because we don't need them. That way, we'll also make the walls a little bit more of what we need. And I'm holding down a Shift key and pulling over as well. And taking them all out, so I now have basically the beginnings. And I'm using the Shift key, and holding down the mouse button when you see that hand so I'm not rotating or anything like that. But you can see now that I've got a rudimentary space, set up. The only thing I'm missing currently is another wall going this way.

So, we're going to come up here, and just put one in. And, a, little bit more wall clean up here, is necessary. We'll just kind of zoom in. We'll get rid of that, too. So there we go. That's the end of our space. We have drawn, basically, this 2D layout using a couple tools. We've used the rectangle tool, we've used offset, and the tape measure tool. These are the basic tools that you do to make a 2D floorplan. Note the walls are drawn on the walls layer, and we've kept all the faces created.

So, basically everything is really pretty much ready to go ahead and go.