Say you're building or renovating a home, wouldn't it be cool to be able to see your new floor plan at 100 percent scale? Want to see the walls of your kitchen so you can make sure the sink is where you want it? Or even drive your car into your future garage to make sure it fits?
All of this is possible at Walk Your Plans, a nationwide franchise that projects your full-size floor plan onto a large, empty white space so you can literally walk through it. The company opened three years ago in Lakewood, Ohio. There are now 20 locations in the USA. Around ten more are expected to open by the end of 2025.
Make your Des Moines plans come true
Why take a tour of a life-size floor plan?
As exciting and fun as it is to fully experience your new space for the first time, the reason for an initial viewing is to save money. The idea is that by studying your floor plan, you can identify layout deficiencies, clearance issues, and other problems before construction begins, when changes will cost much less.
The average tour lasts about two hours and costs about $1,200 per hour. That may seem like a lot, but when you consider that the average change order for a residential construction project costs about $4,000 to complete, the potential for savings becomes clear.
What is a change order? “If I want to make a change after the framing is done — say, the electrical and plumbing is installed and I now want to go from a two-cabin sink to a farmhouse sink, or I want to go from a 36-inch cooktop to a 60-inch cooktop — those are big changes,” says James Machamer, president and owner of Walk Your Plans Des Moines. “It requires a different framework, different plumbing and different electrical systems. They just changed your entire vent structure. So this is going to be a very, very expensive change.” But if you identify and make the change at the design stage, before construction begins, you can get what you want without the costly change order.
How do walk-throughs work?
Typically a viewing is organized by the architect or builder and the cost is factored into the total cost of the house. The builder provides the plans as PDFs and Walk Your Plans projects them at full scale onto the floor and walls of their facility, which is usually a large, empty white room. Machemer's location in Grimes, Iowa, features an elevated platform for a bird's-eye view of the floor plan.
Walk Your Plans services are available for residential and commercial projects as well as landscaping plans. “Anything you have on a two-dimensional plan, we can project it and make it life-size so you can literally walk through it,” Machamer says.
Make your Des Moines plans come true
What else can this technology do?
In addition to projecting 2D plans onto the floor, Walk Your Plans can also project 3D renderings onto a wall. For example, a kitchen wall can be projected to scale so you can see how tall the countertops will be and the distance between cabinets. “This is completely groundbreaking,” says Machamer. “What I like to do is show a vignette of a closet rendering and match it to the floor plan so you can literally stand at your kitchen sink. You can turn around and see how far away your TV is or your fireplace is or where the island is.”
Additionally, multiple designs for the same wall – different arrangements of cabinets, for example – can be shared side by side for easy comparison. Exterior views and/or 3D drawings can also be projected.