Why floorplans are your best friend

Buying a new home is an exciting and rewarding experience, but it’s often unlike any other purchase. In most cases, you can’t wander around a new-build property you’re intending to buy, because it’s still under construction. There might be an example of your chosen house style already on your development (or another one nearby), but it could have different specifications, or a mirror-image layout where everything is the other way around. Even if your property style is the same as a show home, the latter’s apartments will be assigned certain roles through décor and furnishings that might not reflect your plans for your own property. It’s often hard to stand in a fully decorated home office and imagine it as a child’s bedroom, or vice versa.

Getting under your feet

This is where floorplans come in handy. They might look simplistic, but these black-and-white drawings often provide the best representation of the space you’ll be purchasing. They tend to come in one of two forms:

Sales floorplans. Supplied with marketing literature, these show a two-dimensional top-down sketch of your property. Key details include room sizes and window/door/cupboard positions.
Working drawings. Produced by the architects, these go into far greater detail. They contain behind-the-scenes electrical wiring and plumbing pipework, but they also show where sockets and switches will be positioned, which way doors open, and so forth.

Your Cruden Homes’ sales advisor will show you the working drawings for your plot or house type at your reservation appointment, as it is important you understand the detail of what you are buying before committing. You won’t be able to take them away with you, but you’ll still learn a great deal from studying them and will have the opportunity to ask any technical questions arising from your review. And you’ll be able to extract even more value from floorplans in terms of forward planning…

A good plan

Because they’re drawn approximately (though not exactly) to scale, floorplans enable you to think about what sort of furniture you might like for your new home and where it might go. Given the long lead times on many modern furnishings (especially sofas), pre-ordering items which will comfortably fit enables you to coordinate delivery times well in advance (but be mindful of door sizes too!). We’d always recommend, however, waiting to physically measure for items that look like they may not comfortably fit and always wait until you can gain access to your home for window dressings to ensure the best finish.

It's easy to get engrossed in the floorplan game. Some people have been known to create to-scale paper cut-outs of key furnishings, moving them around on the floorplan to determine optimal locations. As well as helping with furniture inspo, removal men can be given precise instructions about where heavy items should be deposited. In larger properties with more rooms, floorplans are also crucial for determining which roles best suit particular apartments. If bedroom three is closer to the master bedroom than bedroom two, would it work better as a nursery?

Finally, combine floorplans with site plans to work out which way your home faces, and allocate room roles accordingly. Home offices and home cinemas work best in north-facing apartments, where light levels are more consistent. Although you’ll have to wait a few months to redecorate once plasterwork has dried out, south-facing apartments are more prone to sun bleaching and will suit darker décor more than northerly rooms where lightness should be accentuated. Calculating this in advance means you won’t spend money on furniture/flooring/accessories which might not match the light levels in a particular room.

And of course, if you prefer to experiment online, many of our developments benefit from a virtual Home Selector system that helps buyers navigate properties room by room, with or without furniture.

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