Three floor plans. Yours to print, change and give away.
Big Floor Plans publishes three original floor plans for classroom use: a house, a CTE trades bay and a small commercial cafe. Each comes as a scaled PDF, a true 1:1 PDF, a DXF and an SVG, in a clean architectural edition and a teaching edition, plus a teacher spec sheet. All of it is free under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence — copy, print, modify and redistribute, including commercially, with credit.
Why these exist
Every walkable lesson needs a floor plan at 1:1 scale, and the honest answer used to be "bring your own." That works for a CTE instructor with a set of drawings and it fails for a third-grade teacher on a Sunday night. So we drew three.
They are not stock plans with a logo on them. They were generated from a parametric model written for teaching, and the dimensions were chosen so the mathematics lands on whole numbers. Every plan has a whole-number diagonal. One bathroom deliberately fails the ADA turning circle so students can find a real failure instead of being told about one. The room areas were tuned so a class can build a genuine dataset with a mean, a median and a range worth discussing.
The three plans
BFP-TP-01 — The Teaching House (Residential)
48'-0" by 36'-0". 1,974 square feet of rooms across 15 rooms. Supports 20 lessons.
An open-plan house with a split-bedroom layout, a walk-in pantry, a closet-to-laundry pass-through, a canted glazed corner and a covered patio on a multi-slide door. Drawn on 2026 residential planning logic rather than as a grid of boxes, because students notice the difference the moment they walk it.
Best for: Elementary and middle-school measurement, geometry and data; ADA and universal design; residential construction pathways.
BFP-TP-02 — The Trades Bay (CTE / shop)
40'-0" by 30'-0". 1,200 square feet of rooms across 7 rooms. Supports 13 lessons.
A teaching shop zoned by process — receive, stage, lay out, machine, finish — with floor-marked walk lanes, a glazed CAD classroom looking onto the floor, and a freestanding 20'-0" training wall framed at 16" on centre.
Best for: Construction trades, blueprint reading, estimating and takeoffs, electrical and plumbing rough-in, NCCER and HBI PACT pathways.
BFP-TP-03 — The Corner Café (Small commercial)
44'-0" by 33'-0". 1,596 square feet of rooms across 9 rooms. Supports 14 lessons.
A café with a separated point-of-sale queue and mobile-pickup counter, a one-way back-of-house, an entry vestibule and four distinct seating types. The plan a business, marketing or data class can actually reason about.
Best for: Business and entrepreneurship, data and statistics, probability, hospitality and retail pathways, and any lesson that needs a commercial floor.
What is in every download
Each plan ships eight files. The clean edition is a plain architectural drawing — walls, doors, glazing, fixtures and room names. The teaching edition adds a one-foot grid, coordinate axes, dimension strings and numbered callouts. Both come as a scaled PDF at quarter-inch scale, a true 1:1 PDF, a DXF on AIA layers for CAD editing, and an SVG at one unit per real inch. A teacher spec sheet lists every room measured, the room-area dataset, every opening with its clear width and a pass or fail against ADA, the lessons the plan supports, and printing notes.
How to print one at full size
Three routes, none of which require buying anything from Big Floor Plans. Tape or chalk one room at full scale on a gym floor or parking lot using the dimensions from the teaching edition — free, and a real trial of the method. Or print it yourself: the 1to1 PDF files carry true full-size page geometry using the PDF UserUnit extension, so any wide-format plotter that honours UserUnit outputs at true scale. Or send the clean scaled PDF to any wide-format print vendor.
License and reuse
All three plans and every file derived from them are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. You may share them — copy and redistribute in any medium or format — and adapt them — remix, transform and build upon them — for any purpose, including commercially. The single condition is attribution: give credit, link to the licence, and say if you changed anything.
Attribution line to copy: "BFP-TP-01 The Teaching House" by Big Floor Plans, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Source: https://www.bigfloorplans.com/sample-plans
These are original drawings. Nothing was traced, copied or adapted from an existing plan — which is why Big Floor Plans can license them this way and most publishers cannot.
Not a construction document
These are instructional drawings. They are not stamped, not engineered, not code-reviewed for any jurisdiction, and not suitable for permitting, bidding or construction. The open licence grants reuse rights; it does not turn a teaching drawing into a construction document.
Frequently asked questions
Are the sample floor plans really free?
Yes. All three plans and every file derived from them are released under CC BY 4.0. You may copy, print, modify, remix and redistribute them, including commercially, as long as you credit Big Floor Plans. No sign-up and no email required.
What is the difference between the clean edition and the teaching edition?
The clean edition is a plain architectural drawing. The teaching edition adds a one-foot grid, coordinate axes, dimension strings and numbered callouts, which is what most of the lessons use.
Are these construction documents?
No. All three were drawn from scratch with a parametric generator written for this purpose. Big Floor Plans owns them outright and is the sole licensor, which is what makes the open licence possible.