How to Find Blueprints or a Floor Plan of My House

To find blueprints or a floor plan of your house, try three places in order: their own closing papers and the previous owner, the builder, and the local building department's permit files. Original plans for an existing house often turn out to be missing or out of date, so the reliable route is to measure the house and draw it yourself, or trace an old plan, listing floor plan or assessor sketch and check it against your tape measure.

This guide covers where the originals might be, what each source is good for, and how to turn whatever you find into an accurate, editable plan.

Where an original floor plan of my house might be

The building department

When someone pulls a permit for new construction or a significant alteration, they usually submit drawings. Some departments keep these on microfilm or in a digital archive searchable by address or parcel number; others never kept single-family plans, or kept only the permit card. Call or check the department's website, have your parcel number ready, and ask what they hold for your address. If the records are not online, a public records request is the usual route, and copying fees are common.

Being able to see a plan does not always mean you can get a copy. In California, for example, Health and Safety Code section 19851 lets the public inspect official plans at the building department, but copies generally need the written permission of the design professional who signed them and of the owner, and the requester signs an affidavit about how the copy will be used. Other states have their own rules. Architectural plans are also protected by copyright. Using a copy to maintain or remodel your own house is different from reproducing it for someone else, but if you plan to do more than that, get advice; this is not legal advice.

Builder and listing plans

For a house in a subdivision, the builder's plan name (often on the original sales paperwork) can lead you to the marketing floor plan for that model. It is a useful starting point, but options, mirror-image versions and later remodels mean your house may not match it. Listing floor plans from a past sale are similar: good for room layout, unreliable for exact sizes.

Why a found plan still needs checking

Even a real construction set shows what was approved, not necessarily what was built. Walls move during construction, closets get added, and decades of remodels rarely make it back into a permit file. Treat any plan you find as a draft. Check at least the overall outside dimensions, two or three rooms, and the position of the main openings with a tape measure before you rely on it for anything that costs money.

Option 1: measure and redraw

If nothing usable exists, measure the house. Start with the outside perimeter, then each room, using running measurements from a corner to every door and window, and note wall thicknesses at doorways. How to measure a room for a floor plan has the full method. A typical three-bedroom house takes a few hours with a helper and a laser measure.

Then draw it to scale, outside walls first, then inside walls, then openings; how to draw a floor plan walks through the steps, and our free floor plan software comparison covers the tools. The outside perimeter is your check: the room sizes plus the wall thicknesses should add up to it.

Option 2: trace an old plan, photo or PDF

If you do have something, even a listing floor plan or a phone photo of a blueprint, tracing the image is faster than starting from nothing, because the layout is already there and you only have to fix the sizes. In FloorGen the steps are:

1. Trace an image. Load a PNG, JPG, WebP or GIF image, or a PDF. For a multi-page PDF, FloorGen asks you to choose the page to trace.
2. Set image scale. Click two points a known distance apart, ideally the ends of the longest dimension you trust, and type the real length. The image is scaled to match.
3. Straighten a crooked scan or photo by marking a line that should be level.
4. Adjust Opacity so the image sits faintly under your walls, and lock it so it cannot be moved by accident.
5. Draw over it, or use Detect walls, which proposes walls from the image's thick dark lines once the scale is set. Review what it proposes: detection works best on clean, high-contrast drawings and poorly on photos with shadows.
6. Correct the sizes with your own measurements. Type exact lengths into walls, and use the Tape measure to compare the traced plan with what you measured.

An example: a single-story ranch

Below is FloorGen's 3-bed ranch template, the kind of single-story ranch house many people want to redraw before a remodel. It is about 70½ × 36½ ft outside, with a 2-car garage at one end, living spaces in the middle and the bedrooms at the other end. Its room areas add up to 2,366.1 ft² net, garage included, and its outside footprint is 2,577.6 ft².

If your house is a ranch of similar shape, starting from this template and moving its walls to your measurements can be faster than drawing from a blank page. The dimension strings run along wall centrelines, so compare them with your measurements accordingly: a room you measured as 11 ft 7½ in inside, between 4½ in interior walls, is 12 ft on centres.

When to pay for as-built drawings

For furniture layout, a remodel wish list or a contractor's rough bid, a plan you drew yourself is usually enough. Hire a drafter, designer or architect to measure and draw as-built drawings when the plan is going to a building department for structural work, when an engineer needs framing information, or when the house has many out-of-square rooms and levels. Some jurisdictions also require that permit drawings for certain work be prepared by a licensed professional; check before you start.