Understanding the language of drawings
Scale - All drawings are drawn to a scale which starts very small for site location plans, growing larger for floor plans and details. The scale is normally written in the format 1:100, which means 1cm. on a drawing represents 100cm (or 1 metre) in real life. Most floor plans issued by architects will be 1:200 for outline proposals and 1:100 for detailed design and working drawings. Occasionally the client may be sent a large scale detailed layout at 1:50 or even 1:20 to check the detail of an area which has a complex arrangement with intricate details, such as a laboratory preparation room or machine area.
It is important to look at the scale on the drawing and get a feeling of how big things are. Most architects sympathise with the difficulty lay people have in understanding scale and will be happy to give examples of size related to something known i.e. that space on the plan is about two times bigger than the room the reader is sitting in. Do not be afraid to ask.
Door swings - Most designers follow convention and use a quarter circle or triangle to indicate which way an external or internal door will swing, either right or left hand. This information will be used by the joiner when hanging the door and fixing the ironmongery, so it is important that this is checked by the client at an early stage as remedial work will be expensive
Staircases - Staircases are shown on plan with the lower half the staircase drawn solid and the upper half shown with a broken line, with a diagonal cut line half way along their length. An arrow drawn along the centre of the staircase points which way you have to travel up the staircase to the upper floor. Sometimes, but not always depending on scale, each step will be numbered indicating how many steps users will have to navigate between floors. Building Regulations dictate how many steps can be used in a flight of stairs before a landing is inserted to provide a resting place.
Hidden detail - It is the convention to draw the plan as though the building were cut through at the height of the average person with everything which can be seen by looking down in a continuous line, and those things that are hidden by means of a broken line. This could be something at high level or hidden beneath something solid.