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Help
How to do the thing you are trying to do, in the words the editor uses. Every number on these pages is read out of the code that draws it.
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Draw your first plan: walls, exact lengths, and where your work is saved.
How to draw a wall
Press W, click where the wall starts, click where it ends. Each further click continues the chain, and clicking back on the first corner closes the outline. How to draw a wall to an exact length
Start drawing, then type the number. It goes into the Length field of the readout by the cursor, and Enter places the point exactly there. Selecting, moving and deleting
Press V for the select tool. Click to select, drag a box for several, drag to move, arrow keys to nudge, Delete to remove. Snapping, the grid and the reference point
The cursor is pulled to real geometry first — endpoints, corners, intersections, midpoints — and falls back to the 100 mm grid. G toggles the grid, Shift locks to 45°. Keyboard shortcuts
Every key the Gridsnap editor uses — tools, editing, the numeric tracker while drawing, and moving around the 3D view. Where your plans are saved (and how to get them back)
Without an account, plans live in your browser and autosave as you draw. Nothing is uploaded unless you sign in and sync, or make a share link. Export the Gridsnap file for a real backup. Panning and zooming — mouse, trackpad and pinch
A mouse wheel zooms, a two-finger trackpad drag pans, and a pinch or ⌘/ctrl+scroll always zooms. If your device is read wrongly, set it by hand under ⚙ → Navigation (this device). Drawing
Walls, doors and windows, storeys, roofs, stairs, terraces and the site.
How to add doors and windows
Press D for a door or N for a window, then click the wall. A door takes a second click to set which way it swings. How to add a second storey
Open the floors menu in the top bar and choose "Empty floor" or "Duplicate current walls". The new storey stacks on top and opens straight away. How to add a basement
Open the floors menu in the top bar and choose "Empty floor below". It is added under the bottom floor at a negative level, and the 3D view digs an excavation for it. Adding stairs — straight, L-shaped and U-shaped
Press S, pick a shape, click to place. A U (switchback) can turn on a landing or on winder treads, and the flight width, length and number of steps are set in the panel. Drawing a roof — gable, hip, mansard and the rest
Press H, pick one of nine roof forms, drag a rectangle over the building. Pitch, overhang and the wall plate height are edited afterwards, and overlapping roofs merge into one form. Flat ceilings and rooms open to the roof
Press L and draw a zone around the rooms that get a flat ceiling. Anything you leave outside it stays open to the roof slope, which is how a vaulted living room sits beside flat-ceilinged bedrooms. Terraces, decks and entrance steps
Press Y, click the corners of the deck, Enter to close. Corners snap to the wall faces, and the level, material, steps and railing are set afterwards in the panel. Ground level, paving, fences and pools
The site around the building — the plinth that sets ground level, paved surfaces and lawn (P), fences with gates (J) and pools (B), all drawn to the same millimetre as the building. Split levels — a sunken or raised floor inside one storey
Press U and draw the area whose floor sits at a different level. Steps and upstands are generated along the boundary, and the level tags are measured from project zero. Placing furniture from the catalog
Press O for furnishing and C for structure, pick an item from the thumbnail picker, click to place. Items that habitually back onto a wall align themselves flush when dropped near one. Checking clearances with a scale figure
Place a standing, seated or wheelchair figure from the People category to see how much room a person really has at a counter, a basin or in a passage. The wheelchair carries a dashed 1500 mm turning circle. Drawing lines, arcs, rectangles, circles, triangles and crosses
Press K for the sketch tools — free lines, arcs, rectangles, circles, triangles and crosses with fills, for everything on a drawing that is not a wall. Combine them with union, subtract, intersect and exclude. They never affect rooms, m² or the plan check. Tracing over a scanned plan or a photo
Drop the image onto the canvas, calibrate its scale against one known distance, then draw over it. Trace mode fades what you have drawn so the image still shows through. Adding a north arrow to a plan
With nothing selected, use Add north arrow in the Site section of the properties panel. Drag its body to move it, the handle at its tip to rotate — and it prints on every sheet. Elevations — how Gridsnap draws them
North, south, east and west elevations are generated from the plan, not drawn. Openings punch their own void and are drawn with real joinery, and heights can be dimensioned on the elevation itself. The 3D view — render modes, hiding the roof and walking through
Three render modes (Simple, Clay, Shaded), a roof you can hide, floors up to the one you are on, and a first-person walkthrough that opens doors as you reach them. Dimensions & annotation
Dimension chains, automatic measuring, text labels and drawing settings.
All dimensions & annotation →Schedules & building data
What the drawing already knows: schedules, build-ups and U-values, quantities and heat loss.
Room, door and window schedules
Open Tables in the top bar for live schedules read straight from the plan — rooms with their areas, doors and windows grouped into types and marked D-01, W-01. Nothing to number by hand. Build-ups and U-values
Give a wall, roof, ceiling or floor slab a layered build-up and its U-value is computed from the layers. Assigning one sets the element's thickness, and the name can be called out on the plan. Quantity takeoff — measured quantities off the drawing
The Quantities tab totals what the plan contains — wall lengths and face areas, roof covering, slab, openings, terraces and paving, grouped by build-up. Pro. Pro
The heat-loss sheet (Σ U×A)
Every wall, roof, ceiling, slab and opening in the envelope with its U-value and area, totalled in W/K. Fabric transmission only — indicative, not a compliance calculation. Pro. Pro
How to calculate wall area in m²
One wall is Length × Height from the properties panel — free. On Pro, select a room for the wall surface enclosing it, or open Tables for every wall in the plan grouped by build-up — openings deducted and junctions counted once in both. Export, print & share
PDF sheets at true scale, DXF for CAD, PNG images and read-only share links.
Exporting a PDF at true scale
Pick the paper (A4–A0) and the ratio (1:20 to 1:2000), tick the pages you want, download. The PDF is true vector output with selectable text, so it measures correctly when printed. Sharing a plan with a link
Press Share, create the link, send it. Whoever opens it sees the plan read-only in the browser — no account, no download — and can duplicate it to edit their own copy. Layers — what shows on screen and what prints
Every object belongs to a system layer by type, and each layer has its own Show and Print switch. One drawing becomes a permit set, a furniture layout and a working drawing without deleting anything. Plan check & AI
The automatic layout checks, the fix suggestions, and the AI features on Pro.
The plan check — what it looks for
A live badge and a findings panel that check placement and circulation as you draw. The mechanical impossibilities are free; the expert rules — room sizes, daylight, clearances, blocked doors — are Pro. Explain & Fix — the assistant's notes on a finding
Press Explain on a plan-check finding for a short architect's note on why it matters, and Fix to let the editor apply the change — checked against every rule before it lands. Pro. Pro
Furnishing a room automatically
Select a named room and press ✨ Furnish room. The assistant reads what the room is and what shape it is, and places furniture that fits, snapped to the walls. Pro. Pro
Account, projects & billing
Accounts, cloud projects, version history, and changing your plan.
What is free, and what Pro adds
Drawing, 3D, elevations and vector PDF/DXF export are free forever with no watermarks. Pro adds the expert layer — deeper plan checks, AI notes and fixes, unlimited synced projects, design options and version history. Working on several plans at once (tabs)
Every open plan is a tab across the top, with its own undo history and its own cloud project, and you can copy and paste between them. Closing a tab asks first. Design options — several schemes of one plan
Keep the existing layout and the alternative side by side in one project, switch between them from the Options chip, and put two on one screen with Compare. Pro. Pro
Reference — architectural standards
The real numbers: room minimums, clearances, door and window sizes, wall thicknesses.
Minimum room sizes for bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens
A bedroom wants at least 7 m² and 2.0 m of clear width, a living room 10 m² and 2.4 m, a kitchen 4.5 m² and 1.7 m, a bathroom 2.0 m² and 1.2 m. Gridsnap flags a room under those on the Pro plan check. How thick should a wall be? Outer, load-bearing and partition
Gridsnap's presets are 400 mm for an external wall, 250 mm load-bearing and 120 mm for a partition — but wall thickness is regional, so they are settings you change, not fixed constants. Standard door sizes
A standard internal door opening is 900 × 2100 mm, with 800 mm used for bathrooms, WCs and store rooms. Gridsnap draws 900 × 2100 by default and accepts anything from 300 to 6000 mm wide. Standard window sizes and sill heights
A standard window sill sits 900 mm above the floor with the head at 2100 mm, giving 1200 mm of glass height. Gridsnap draws 1200 mm wide by default and raises the sill to 1400 mm in wet rooms. Door swings: how much clear space a door needs
A hinged door needs a quarter-circle of clear floor its own width in radius, plus about 800 mm of walk-up on the other side. Gridsnap's Pro plan check flags furniture in either zone and two doors swinging into each other. Corridor and circulation widths
A corridor wants 900 mm minimum and 1000–1200 mm to be comfortable. Gridsnap's route check guarantees a 600 mm walkable path to every door, use-face and stair foot, and flags a named hall narrower than 900 mm. How much window area does a room need? The 1/8 rule
The rule of thumb is glazing of at least one eighth of the floor area — a 16 m² bedroom wants 2 m² of window. Gridsnap's Pro plan check measures it per room and flags anything under. The kitchen work triangle: rules and measurements
Sink, stove and fridge should form a triangle with no leg longer than 2.7 m and the three legs adding up to no more than 7.9 m. Gridsnap's Pro plan check measures it and flags a stretched one. How wide should a galley kitchen aisle be?
1050 mm is the minimum aisle between two facing kitchen runs and 1200 mm is what two cooks need. Gridsnap's Pro plan check flags a galley or island aisle under 1050 mm. Clearance in front of a toilet, basin and shower
A toilet needs 600 mm clear in front and 400 mm from its centreline to anything either side; a basin 600 mm in front; a shower 600 mm and a bath 700 mm to step out into. Gridsnap's Pro plan check tests the toilet and the basin. How much space around a dining table?
Leave 700 mm from the table edge to a wall to pull a chair out, 900 mm where someone also walks behind the seated diners, and 600 mm of table edge per person. Gridsnap's plan check does not test this — the layout engine does. Resources
Longer reading, worked examples and the rest of the site.
Floor plan guides Long-form: how to draw, how to read, symbols, clearances, kitchen layouts. Free templates Editable starting plans that open straight in the editor. Floorplan Rescue Real submitted plans reviewed and fixed in public. Comparisons Gridsnap against the other floor plan tools, fact-checked and dated. Feature list Everything the editor does, free and Pro. Pricing What is free, what Pro adds, and what it costs. What's new Every user-visible change, newest first, with the date it shipped. /llms.txt The machine-readable map of this site, for AI assistants.
Still stuck?
The editor has a Need help? button that sends a message with your plan attached, so the answer can be about your actual drawing. Or email hello@gridsnap.app.
Open the editor. Draw the first wall.
No download, no account, no watermark. Your plan is measurable, printable and shareable from the first click.