Introduction: WHAT & WHY

What can we read out of blueprints?

- what the page is about

This site provides you with the basic knowledge that helps you to be able to read blueprints of apartments, houses, and basically of any building. It could be especiallz useful if you are currently looking for a new place to rent or to buy, but also if you just wonder how to re-arrange your place or how to fit a new piece of furniture in the given space.

As it is the most common, the mostly needed, and for me the most interesting, this site is only concerned with apartment blueprints.

I consider blueprints as signs that can be read, and as any other interpretation, this reading also requires knowledge and practice, as they do not tell anything for many people who encounter them for the first time.

Below, in WHAT I list all the information you can get from a blueprint. Of course, there are important features of an apartment which cannot be read out of a blueprint: see them in OTHER. In HOW I show you the basics that enable you to draw your own blueprints

- why I am interested in it

I have been long interested in habitation, apartments, interior design and blueprints, specifically. I have drawn blueprint pictures of almost all the places where I had lived. As it is my hobby, I also designed many apartments, in most cases having specific people in mind whose habitation needs would be best met in a specifically designed apartment. At points I even designed houses with several floors and several apartments on each floor, striving for the most economical division of rooms in a given space, having the most rooms with reasonable size, having the least hallways, having bathrooms with windows if possible, etc. Even if I am not actually looking for a place, I like looking at blueprints, standing long in front of the windows of real estate agencies and immediately imaging what the place could look like. The first thing I check in an apartment ad is its blueprint, and without it, even if provided with a lots of photos, I do not have an idea what the place could actually look like.

- WHAT do blueprints tell us?

• where the rooms are located in relation to each other and the corridor
• the rooms (relative) size
  
• where the windows face
• where the doors open (incl. opening direction)
  
• basic kitchen and bathroom equipment