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How do I send a floor plan to my contractor?

Send a PDF to whoever needs to read the drawing, and a DXF to whoever needs to keep drawing on it — and write the scale, date and where the measurements came from directly on the drawing.

The two questions that decide the format

Before sending a floor plan to a contractor, you only need to answer two things about the recipient: Does the drawing need to be read, or does someone need to keep drawing on it? And what was the last drawing opened in?

If the drawing needs to be read — to give a quote, to understand the room, to measure a wall length from — PDF is the right choice. A PDF opens in the email on the phone, in the browser at the office, and on the printer in the site cabin. No installation, no licence, no version mismatch.

If someone needs to keep drawing — a kitchen laid out, a wall moved, a drawing dropped into the design office's own template — PDF is the wrong choice. A PDF is a picture of a drawing, not the drawing. The recipient cannot drag a wall. That is where you send DXF instead.

If you are unsure, send both. A floor plan as PDF is typically under 1 MB, and a DXF of an ordinary home is a text file of a few hundred kilobytes. There is no need to guess the recipient's tools when both files can sit in the same email.

PDF: for whoever is giving you a quote

PDF is the format you send to the contractor pricing the job. The advantages of PDF for a floor plan are concrete:

• It looks the same everywhere. Fonts, line weights and dimensions are baked into the file. A drawing that is legible on your screen is legible on the recipient's.
• It can be printed to scale. If the drawing is drawn at 1:50 or 1:100 and printed without scaling (choose "actual size" or 100%, not "fit to page"), you can measure straight off the paper with a ruler.
• It can't be changed by accident. What you sent is what gets priced. That matters if there is later a disagreement about what the quote covered.
• It can carry more than the floor plan. A takeoff per room, areas, a window-and-door schedule and a checklist can all sit as pages in the same file, so the contractor has everything in one place.

The drawback of PDF is the same as its advantage: it cannot be edited. If the recipient needs to draw, PDF wastes both your time.

DXF: for whoever keeps drawing

DXF is the file format you send to the architect, the design office, the kitchen company or the engineer. DXF is a vector drawing: every wall is a line with two endpoints in real coordinates, not a collection of pixels. The recipient can measure on it, snap to it, copy it and build further on top of it.

What matters in a DXF you pass on is the layers. A usable floor plan in DXF has walls, doors, windows, room names, areas and furniture each sitting in its own layer — so the recipient can turn off the furniture, lock the walls, and draw their own work on top. A DXF where everything sits in a single layer is technically still a DXF, but it is worth a third as much.

The second important thing is the unit. A DXF does not always carry its own scale, so state in the email what one unit in the file represents. If the drawing is written in metres, a 4.12 m wall appears as 4.12 units. Some design offices work in millimetres and need to scale by 1000. It takes ten seconds to write and saves a phone call.

HouseSense writes DXF with the layers split out — exterior wall, interior wall, door, window, opening without a door, room name, area and furniture — in metres, and with the layer names in whichever language you choose for the export. If the drawing is going to a design office working to ISO 13567, the layers can instead get coded names, with the full key to the codes written out in a cover sheet placed in the folder alongside the files.

Why not DWG?

If your architect asks for "a DWG", DXF is almost always the right answer. DWG is Autodesk's closed, binary format — the one AutoCAD saves in by default. There is no public specification anyone can freely write to, so ordinary programs and apps cannot simply produce a DWG.

DXF is Autodesk's own exchange format — Drawing Exchange Format — and it is documented and open. AutoCAD, Revit, ArchiCAD, SketchUp, Vectorworks, BricsCAD, LibreCAD and QGIS all read DXF. When a design office says "send me a DWG", they usually mean "send me something I can keep drawing on", and that is exactly what DXF is.

If you're told that DXF doesn't work, it is almost always one of two things: either the file is written in a very new DXF version the recipient's older program doesn't recognise, or the unit has been misread, so the house lands at 4 cm or 4 km. Both are solved by asking about DXF version and unit, not by hunting for a DWG conversion.

What MUST be on the drawing before you send it

A floor plan meant for a quote is only as good as what is written on it. Check these nine things before you hit send:

1. Dimensions. Wall lengths in metres or millimetres — not just the room's area.
2. Scale (1:50, 1:100) and a clear "measured internally".
3. Room names on every room, including the utility room, hallway and storage.
4. Area per room in m² to one decimal place.
5. Doors and windows with width and height — ideally in a schedule with numbers pointing back to the drawing.
6. Ceiling height per room, if it varies. Sloped ceilings must be stated explicitly.
7. A north arrow, if sunlight, windows or a conservatory are part of the job.
8. Date and version. "Plan v3, 23-08-2026". Contractors often receive three versions of the same drawing, and the newest only wins if you can tell which one it is.
9. Where the measurements came from. Write honestly "measured by the owner with a phone scan" or "drawn from hand measurements". That tells the recipient what needs double-checking.

Don't write that a wall is load-bearing — unless you know it

One of the most dangerous words on a floor plan sent to a contractor is "load-bearing". No app, no scan and no 3D model can determine whether a wall is load-bearing. That requires a qualified building surveyor, a consulting engineer, or the home's original structural drawings — and removing a load-bearing wall requires approval from the authorities before work begins.

If you mark a wall as load-bearing on a drawing you made yourself, write next to it that this is your assumption, and that it needs confirming. HouseSense can draw a wall with a load-bearing mark if you set the mark yourself, but the app never guesses it for you — the mark is your claim, not the app's measurement.

Sending the files so they actually arrive

The delivery itself fails more often than people think. Four things help:

• Name the files so they can be found. "Elm Street 12 - plan v3 - 2026-08-23.pdf" beats "IMG_4471.pdf". The contractor has 40 quotes in the same folder.
• Send as an attachment, not a screenshot. A screenshot of a drawing loses the dimensions and cannot be printed to scale.
• Keep the email under 20–25 MB. Many company mail servers reject anything larger. If the 3D model is included, send it as a link instead.
• State in the email what you want priced. The drawing shows the home; the text needs to say whether it's every room or just the two.

Does the contractor need the 3D model?

As a rule, no. A carpenter, a painter or a flooring installer quotes from a floor plan and a takeoff — not from a 3D model that requires a program they first have to download. The 3D model is useful in three cases: when the kitchen company or architect works in 3D themselves, when you want to show an idea to someone who struggles to read a floor plan, and when you want to see the room yourself before deciding.

If you do need to send a model, send it in whatever format the recipient asks for. If nothing is specified, USDZ is the one that opens without fuss on iPhone, iPad and Mac, while OBJ and GLB are the two read by the widest range of programs across Windows, Mac and the web.

What HouseSense sends along

In HouseSense, the PDF report is assembled in a single sheet where you choose which rooms and content to include: the home's floor plan, plan per room, takeoff per room and in total, budget, checklist, and a window-and-door schedule. The CAD drawing is written as a layered DXF, and you can choose which language the PDFs and layer names are written in — so a plan for a German or Polish contractor doesn't arrive in Danish. The files land in a folder you can save to Files or attach to an email directly, and a cover sheet goes with them explaining what the figures are and how they were measured.

Whichever app you use, the same rule applies: PDF for whoever reads it, DXF for whoever keeps drawing — and scale, date and measurement method written on the drawing, so there is no doubt about what the recipient has been given.