What are Framing Plans?

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A framing plan is a plan that’s designed to show the locations, materials (e.g. steel, timber), sizes, spacings and numbers of the structural elements that will be used to build your house. Ensuring that the frame’s built the way it’s intended is very important from an engineering perspective, and it’s likely that separate framing plans will be drawn for floors, roof areas and the walls.

As well as showing how things like footings, girders, rafters, bracings, joists, and struts are arranged, framing plans will also feature supplementary detail drawings where they’re required, to show how the different elements are to be anchored, joined, and fastened.

Framing plans are normally very specific about what’s required, for good reason. Different window manufacturers produce windows in different sizes, for example, so specifying exactly what’s required at this stage helps to ensure that the appropriate sizes are understood and that rough openings are the right fit.