All articles · 6 min read

What is an elevation, and what does it show that a floor plan doesn't?

An elevation is a wall seen straight on, with no perspective. It shows heights — window height, sill height, ceiling height, sloped ceilings — that a floor plan simply cannot show, because a plan is only ever seen from above.

Elevation, plan and section — the three basic drawings

A building is described with three kinds of drawing, and each answers a different question. You cannot do without any of them.

• The floor plan is the home seen straight from above, sliced at roughly 1.2 metres up. It answers: where are the rooms, how thick are the walls, how wide is the window, how large is the area. It says nothing about heights.
• The elevation is a wall or a facade seen straight on. It answers: how high up do things sit, how tall is the wall, how are the windows arranged from floor to ceiling.
• The section cuts the building vertically, like a cross-cut through a dollhouse. It answers: what is inside the construction, how do the floors connect, what is the floor-to-ceiling height, how does the roof run.

The difference between an elevation and a section is where the "saw" lies. An elevation is a view from outside — you see the surface as it is, without cutting into anything. A section cuts through and shows the construction's insides: floor build-up, deck between storeys, rafters.

What you can read from an elevation

The elevation is the drawing that settles whether something can fit at a given height. Concretely:

• Sill height — the distance from the floor up to the underside of the window. It decides whether you can see out while sitting on the sofa, and whether a kitchen counter can run under the window. An ordinary living-room window typically has a sill around 80-100 cm; a kitchen window above the worktop usually sits 90-100 cm up or higher.
• Window height and head height — how much window there is, and how much wall above it. The distance from the top of the window to the ceiling decides whether a curtain rail can hang there, and how far light reaches into the room.
• Door head height — interior doors are typically 200-210 cm tall. The gap between the door frame and the ceiling is where a row of wall cabinets or a running shelf has to fit.
• Ceiling height — the number that decides how a room feels. An ordinary post-war house often runs around 2.3-2.5 m; an older flat can have 3 m or more.
• Sloped ceilings and knee walls — on an upper floor under a pitched roof, it is the elevation (or the section) that shows how low it is at the gable and how high it is in the middle. That is what decides what can stand against the wall, and how much of the floor area is actually usable.
• The height of every fixed thing — radiators, built-in cupboards, washbasin, mirror, a row of tiles, a TV on the wall.

Facade elevation: the outdoor version

When someone says "elevation" about a house from outside, they mean a facade elevation: the house's north facade, south facade, east facade, west facade — one drawing per side, each seen head-on.

The facade elevation is the drawing planning authorities typically want to see before approving a build, because it shows the house's appearance and height: roof pitch, ridge height, the placement and size of windows, changes in material, dormers, chimney. It is often marked with levels: the level of the ground, the floor, the eaves and the ridge.

The facade elevation is also what you need when you want to see how a new window or a new dormer will change the face of the house. No floor plan can answer that — the plan only shows that the hole in the wall becomes 30 cm wider.

Why there's no perspective in an elevation

An elevation is orthographic: every line that is parallel in reality is parallel on the drawing, and nothing shrinks because it is further away. Exactly like a floor plan.

That is the whole point. Because there is no perspective, the drawing is to scale: you can take a measurement anywhere on the elevation, multiply by the scale, and get the right figure. A photograph of the same wall is useless for that — the camera makes the upper parts of the wall smaller and bends the vertical lines.

In return, an elevation looks "flat", and that is a known weakness: a 20 cm alcove and a 60 cm alcove look the same on the elevation. That is why an elevation is always read alongside the floor plan. The plan gives you depth, the elevation gives you height.

Elevation in practice: the jobs it solves

There are some very concrete tasks you cannot get through without an elevation of the wall:

• Kitchens. A kitchen is a height problem: 90 cm worktop, 50-60 cm of clear splashback, wall cabinets above that, an extractor hood at the right height, and a window that has to fit in between. Kitchen fitters therefore draw an elevation of every wall.
• Bathrooms and tiling. How many rows of tiles go up the wall, where does the tile break land relative to the window sill, where does the tap sit. Tile counts are worked out on the elevation, not on the plan.
• Built-in storage. A floor-to-ceiling cupboard wall has to be drawn on the elevation, because the ceiling height and any slopes decide what can be built.
• Painting. The wall area — what the paint has to cover — is a height times a length, minus the windows and doors. That figure comes from the elevation.
• A new window. If a window needs to be made taller or lowered, the elevation is what the tradesperson and the authorities look at.

The sums: wall area from an elevation

Here is how you find a wall's paintable area:

1. The wall's gross area: length × height. E.g. 4.20 m × 2.45 m = 10.29 m².
2. Subtract the openings. A window at 1.20 × 1.30 m = 1.56 m². A door at 0.90 × 2.05 m = 1.85 m². Together 3.41 m².
3. Net wall area: 10.29 − 3.41 = 6.88 m².

If the wall is to be painted in two coats, and the paint covers 6-8 m² per litre per coat, you need 6.88 × 2 ÷ 7 ≈ 2.0 litres for that one wall. Add 10% for waste and an extra pass in the corners, and you buy 2.5 litres.

Note that small openings are often not subtracted in practice — most painters don't deduct for openings under about 0.5 m², because the extra time spent cutting in around a small hole costs more than the area itself saves.

The elevation of an interior wall in HouseSense

HouseSense can fold a wall up out of the floor plan: hold your finger on a wall, and it rises and is shown head-on as an elevation, with windows and doors in place and the measurements written on. Furniture standing close to the wall can be shown too, so you can see what is actually covering the wall — and hidden again just as easily.

The wall areas on the elevation are worked out by the same rules as the app's takeoff for contractor quotes, so the figure you see on the wall is the same one that ends up in the quote paperwork. That is what turns an elevation into more than an illustration: it is a calculator for heights, and it is only useful if its figures and the plan's figures come from the same measurement.

Quick guide: which drawing do you need?

• Where are things? Floor plan.
• How high up do things sit? Elevation.
• What's inside the construction, and how do the floors connect? Section.
• What does the house look like from outside? Facade elevation.
• Where does the house sit on the plot? Site plan, typically at 1:500.