When faced with a blank piece of paper, it can be daunting, but the truth is that most design problems need to be solved before the pencil even touches paper. Understanding and analyzing floor plans helps you to understand the relationship between spaces, the way in which people move through spaces, and whether the space feels constrained or expansive. Before you start drawing, I encourage you to take a moment to analyze a basic residential floor plan, and then follow along with your finger to track the movement from the front door to the bedroom, for example. Where is the most direct route? Where would you be forced to make a detour? Simply taking a moment to quietly analyze a floor plan can help you develop your spatial sense far more than rapid-fire sketching will.
A good practice exercise is to take an existing floor plan and draw it again at half the size. Don’t worry about getting it right. Think about the relationships between spaces. Don’t worry about color or furniture. Think about wall widths, door swings, and hallway width. A novice designer will draw walls as one-dimensional lines and forget that walls are three-dimensional and take up space. And will end up with a plan that doesn’t work. Being mindful of that and simply “widening” the walls in your sketch right away gets you closer to a real plan.
A frequent error in room planning is to create each room as a separate entity without much thought to how they will intersect. The result is awkward door swings and circulation running right through furniture groupings. If you find this happening, stop drawing rooms and start drawing the paths between them. Use arrows to illustrate how a person might move through the space on any given day. If your arrows are bending, crossing over each other or leading to dead ends, you have a plan that needs reconfiguring long before you begin thinking about colors and finishes.
If you have 15 minutes, spend the first 5 minutes looking at a plan. The second 5 minutes, try to draw one from memory. The last 5 minutes, go over your rough plan and note any sections you struggled with or drew wrong. You don’t need to get it right, you just need to know what you forgot. With practice, the ability to recall more of the plan gets easier, and the things you struggle with will give you an idea of where your weaknesses in the spatial layout are. By practicing like this for just a few minutes, you can get your mind comfortable with the plan without having to spend hours or even have to get out a lot of materials.
Often, the problem is that you are attempting to design the entire floor plan from scratch. Try using a floor plan you like as a starting point, and then just change one thing: make the living room a little larger, move the kitchen to the other side of the house, etc. Having one goal for what you are trying to accomplish keeps the design decisions from feeling overwhelming, and still allows you to be creative. Once you have made a few changes, you will have adapted the floor plan to fit your needs, and you will have a working floor plan to serve as a basis for your design. If you look at floor plans as a problem to be solved, rather than a picture to be duplicated, you will find the drawing process is a bit less hit-or-miss.