An as-built floor plan records a building exactly as it stands today - the real walls, the real openings, the real dimensions - not what a designer once drew. Architects, surveyors, space planners and property managers all start from one, because every refurbishment, lease plan and area calculation depends on knowing what is actually there. This guide explains what an as-built plan is and how to produce one quickly and accurately with RoomPlot.
What an as-built plan is
An as-built (or existing-conditions) drawing documents a structure after it has been built or altered, capturing the walls, doors, windows and fixed elements at their measured positions. It is the baseline for everything that follows: building owners use it to work out gross and lettable areas, designers use it to plan a fit-out, and contractors use it so a quote is based on the real room, not an out-of-date set of drawings. The one rule is accuracy - an as-built plan is only worth having if its dimensions can be trusted.
Capture the existing conditions
Traditionally this meant a tape, a clipboard and hours of sketching. RoomPlot collapses it to a walk around the room:
- LiDAR scan on a Pro iPhone or iPad captures walls, doors, windows and openings to their true size in seconds, and merges room after room into one structure across a whole property.
- Manual drawing on any device starts from a room-shape template; type each measured length and snapping keeps the corners square.
- Multi-floor support lets you record each storey and switch between them, so a whole building lands in one project.
Because the geometry comes from the scan rather than a guess, the plan is correctly scaled from the first second - which is the whole point of an as-built.
Tidy the geometry and add the areas
A raw scan needs a light edit before it is a drawing. RoomPlot lets you move, resize, rotate, add or delete any wall, door or window after capture, with undo and redo throughout, so you can square up a noisy corner or set an exact dimension. Then add the numbers an as-built is bought for: zone labels with per-room areas, and a floor-area figure calculated from the wall centrelines offset to the inner faces, RICS and BOMA style, output in m² or ft².
Tip. Capture the whole shell before you trim anything. It is faster to delete a stray element than to discover a missing wall back at the desk - and a second pass on site costs far more than thirty seconds of over-scanning.
Deliver it in the right format
An as-built is only useful if it lands in the recipient's workflow. RoomPlot exports a single-page PDF or PNG for a quick record, a multi-page branded Report PDF with a plan summary and an area schedule for a formal deliverable, and DXF geometry that opens in any CAD package at real-world size for the next designer to build on.
