Can I scale building areas off floor plans, or is more documentation required?
Floor plans prepared for construction are technical documents meant to indicate relationships between building systems. Floor plan are often schematic, and many relevant detail dimensions, such as the location of the inside face of exterior glazing, are shown on detail drawings elsewhere in the construction documents. For this reason, area measurements prepared only from plans, without reference to other parts of the construction documents, or field dimensions, can be inaccurate. A full set of architectural and structural construction or as-built documents is the normal minimum set of documents required to perform accurate building area measurements. Lacking this, field dimensions of major significant dimensions are highly recommended for accurate measurements.
