How to Read a 3 BHK Floor Plan

Most people look at a 3 BHK floor plan and see rooms. A plan is more literal than that: it is a horizontal slice through the apartment, cut at about waist height and viewed from above, drawn to a stated ratio. Everything on the sheet follows from that one convention.

This is how to read one properly, and what to do about the four things it will not tell you.

Start with the scale and the north point

Before any room, find two marks. The scale — written as a ratio such as 1:100, or drawn as a bar — is what turns the drawing into measurements. At 1:100, a centimetre on paper is a metre on site. If neither a ratio nor a bar is printed, the sheet is an illustration and no dimension read off it means anything.

The north point tells you which way the apartment faces. It is the difference between a bedroom that takes the morning sun and one that takes the afternoon heat, and it is the single piece of information a photograph of a show flat can never give you. Orientation is a fact about the drawing; the comfort it implies is a judgement you make yourself.

Read the line weights

The thickness of a line carries meaning. Anything cut through by the section plane is drawn heavy; anything seen below or beyond it is drawn light.

• Heavy solid lines are walls and columns cut through by the slice. Their drawn thickness is the real wall thickness, to scale.
• Lighter lines are things seen rather than cut — sills, counters, steps, sanitary fittings.
• Dashed lines are things above the cut, typically a beam, a loft or the outline of a slab overhead.
• Hatched or filled areas mark a different material or a shaft, and shafts are worth finding because they cannot move.

Wall thickness matters more than it looks. An external wall drawn thicker than the internal partitions tells you the envelope is doing something different from the dividers — and it is the thickness that explains why the carpet figure sits well below the built-up one.

Door swings, clear widths and the furniture that is not there

Every door is drawn as a leaf and a quarter-circle arc. The arc is where the leaf sweeps, and it is real space that cannot hold anything. Two arcs overlapping in a passage means two doors that collide.

Check the clear width of the opening, not the width of the frame — that is the number a mattress, a fridge or a wheelchair has to pass through. Then check the same for the corridor turns between the entry and each bedroom.

The furniture on the drawing is illustration. It is drawn to scale, which makes it useful for judging whether a bed fits, and it is not part of what is being sold. Measure the room and compare it against furniture you actually own rather than against the drawn arrangement.

Read the area callouts against the definition, not against each other

Rooms usually carry a dimension pair, and the apartment usually carries an area total somewhere on the sheet. Both need a label before they mean anything.

Carpet area is defined in section 2(k) of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 as the net usable floor area of an apartment, excluding the area covered by the external walls, areas under service shafts, exclusive balcony or verandah area and exclusive open terrace area, but including the area covered by internal partition walls. Read that definition twice, because three of its exclusions are the ones that surprise people: the balcony, the open terrace and the shafts.

So a plan showing a generous balcony is showing you something real that is nonetheless outside the carpet figure. That is not a trick; it is the definition. The trick would be quoting the balcony inside a carpet number, which the definition does not allow.

The 3 BHK questions specifically

Three bedrooms is where circulation starts to cost real area, and a plan shows you exactly how the designer paid for it.

• How much of the plan is corridor? Trace the path from the entry to each bedroom. Space you only walk through is space you paid for and cannot furnish.
• Are the bedrooms buffered from the living room? Look for a wardrobe run, a bathroom or a passage between the two, rather than a shared partition.
• Does the third bedroom have a real wall for a bed? A wall broken by a door, a window and a wardrobe leaves nowhere to put one.
• Where does the utility sit relative to the kitchen? A utility reached only through a bedroom is a plan that will annoy someone daily.
• Can two rooms open windows on different faces? Cross ventilation needs openings on more than one wall, and the plan is where you can see whether they exist.

The four things a floor plan does not show

• Height. A plan is a horizontal cut. Floor-to-ceiling height, beam drops and false ceiling depth come from a section drawing, not from this sheet.
• Level changes. A step at a balcony threshold or a sunken bathroom is invisible in plan unless it is annotated.
• What is outside the window. The plan shows the opening. It cannot show what the opening faces.
• Whether this drawing was approved. A marketing plan and a sanctioned plan are different documents, and only one of them binds anybody.

Check the drawing against the document

Section 19(1) of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 entitles an allottee to obtain the information relating to sanctioned plans and layout plans, along with the specifications, approved by the competent authority. That is the check that makes everything above worth doing: put the plan you were shown next to the plan that was approved, and confirm they are the same apartment.

Then put the carpet figure on the drawing next to the carpet figure in the agreement for sale. Those two numbers agreeing is a small thing that takes two minutes and settles a large one.

Every SUYUG 3 BHK on the corridor is listed with its configuration name, its area as published and the K-RERA registration it belongs to on the 3 BHK apartments page — start there, then ask for the sanctioned plan. The vocabulary on this page is defined in the glossary, and the questions buyers ask most often are answered on the FAQ page.