Walk Through Your Floor Plan Before You Build with This Simple but Genius Tech

Say you’re building or remodeling a house: Wouldn't it be cool to be able to walk around your new floor plan at 100% scale? To be able to see the walls of your kitchen so you can ensure 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 floor plan at full scale onto a large, empty white space so you can, quite literally, walk through it. The company opened three years ago in Lakewood, Ohio, and now there are 20 locations around the U.S., with about 10 more slated to open by the end of 2025.

Why Do a Walk-Through of a Life-Size Floor Plan?

As exciting and fun as it is to experience your new space at full scale for the first time, the reason to first do a walk-through is to save money. The idea is that spending time immersed in your floor plan helps you catch layout flaws, spacing issues, and other problems before construction begins, when making changes costs a lot less.

The average walk-through lasts about two hours and costs about $1,200 per hour. That might seem like a lot, but when you consider that the average change order on a residential construction project costs about $4,000 to complete, the potential savings become clear.

What is a change order? “If I want to make a change after the framing is done—let’s say the electric and plumbing are in and now I want to go from a two-stall 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 takes different framing, different plumbing, and different electrical. You’ve just changed your whole venting structure. So that’s going to be a very, very expensive change." But if you catch and make the change at the blueprint stage, before construction begins, you can get what you want without the costly change order.

How Do Walk-Throughs Work?

Typically, a walk-through is arranged by the architect or builder, and the cost gets wrapped 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 space. Machemer's location in Grimes, Iowa, includes an elevated platform for getting a bird's-eye view of the floor plan.

Walk Your Plans services are available for residential and commercial projects as well as for landscaping plans. “Anything that you have on a two-dimensional plan, we can project and bring it to life size for you to literally walk through it,” Machamer says. 

What Else Can This Technology Do?

In addition to projecting 2D plans on the floor, Walk Your Plans can project 3D renderings onto a wall. For example, a kitchen wall can be projected at scale so you can see how high the countertops will be and the distance between cabinets. “That totally is a game changer,” Machamer says. “What I like to do is display a vignette of a cabinet rendering and match that 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, or where the island is.”

Also, multiple designs for the same wall—for example, different arrangements of cabinetry—can be shared side by side for easy comparison. Exterior elevations and/or 3D drawings can be projected as well.