What is a kitchen elevation drawing?

A drawing of one wall of the kitchen seen straight on from inside the room, showing the cabinets, appliances and wall units on it with their widths and heights, and the heights of the worktop, tiles, wall cabinets, hood and every socket, switch, water and drain point. Where the floor plan says where things go, the elevation says how high.

Why do builders and electricians want elevations?

Because heights live on them. A socket at 1150 mm, a hood at 1550 mm, tiles to 1470 mm, a wall cabinet whose underside is 450 mm above the worktop: none of that is on the floor plan. An electrician chasing cables into a wall before the plaster goes on works from the elevation, not the plan.

Do the elevations update when I change the plan?

Yes, instantly. They are drawn from the same model, so moving a unit in the plan moves it on the elevation, and dragging a height on the elevation changes it in 3D. There is no separate drawing to keep in step.

Can I get an elevation of an island?

Yes. Free-standing units get their own sheet, viewed from the side their fronts face, with the same dimension chains and levels.

Kitchen Elevation Drawings, Generated From Your Plan

Elevation drawing of a kitchen back wall exported from Setout Kitchen: corner unit, twin-bowl sink cabinet with tap, dishwasher, drawer unit and refrigerator, the tiled band to 1470 mm, level markers at the worktop and ceiling, dimension chains top and bottom, a scale bar and a title block — A back-wall elevation as the planner exports it, 4600 mm wall, 2800 mm ceiling. Every figure is read from the model.

What an elevation is for

Nearly everything that goes wrong between a kitchen plan and a fitted kitchen is a height. The socket that ended up behind the dishwasher, the hood that would not clear the window, the tiles that stopped 50 mm short of the wall cabinets, the wall cabinet hung so low nobody could chop under it. None of those appear on a floor plan, because a floor plan is a view from above. An elevation is the view from inside the room, one wall at a time, and heights are its whole point.

What Setout Kitchen draws

One sheet per wall, and one for each free-standing island, with the wall's units in order and dimensioned along the top and bottom, the worktop and its 40 mm slab, the tiled band with a drag handle at its top edge, wall cabinets and the hood at their mounting heights, tall units and the fridge standing past the worktop, and every socket, switch, water and drain point you have placed, each with its height above the finished floor. Units on the neighbouring wall that meet this one are hatched, so a return is never read as a gap.

Elevation of the left wall of the same kitchen: a hatched corner unit returning from the back wall, a 50 mm filler, drawer unit, hob cabinet with the chimney hood above at 1550 mm, oven housing and base cabinet — The left wall of the same kitchen: the hood's underside at 1550 mm, and the back wall's corner unit hatched where it returns.

Each sheet carries the same furniture an architect's drawing does: a title and convention note, a graphic scale bar, and a title block with the sheet code, what is on it, the units, and your client, date, revision and status fields, so two prints from different weeks can be told apart.

How to read one

Conventions used on the elevations
Mark	Meaning
Viewed from inside the room	You are standing in the kitchen looking at that wall, so left on the drawing is left in the room
● = offset 0	The corner the wall's positions are measured from; the plan uses the same corner
▽ +870	A level marker: this line is 870 mm above the finished floor
Dimension chain	The widths of the units along the wall in order, with GAP where the wall is bare and RET where a neighbouring wall's unit returns
Hatched unit	A unit on the adjacent wall that meets this one, seen end-on
Dashed line with a handle	The top of the tiled splashback, which you can drag
B03, A02	Unit codes: B for base, A for appliance, matching the plan and schedule
NTS	Not to scale on paper: read the numbers, use the bar for proportion

Editing in the elevation

The elevation is not only an output. Select a unit on it and drag it sideways to move it along the wall; drag the purple edge handles to resize it; use the arrow keys to move it 10 mm at a time, or up and down to change a wall unit's mounting height. Drag the tile line to set how high the splashback runs on that wall, or switch it off for a wall that stays painted. Every change shows in the plan and the 3D view at once.

Exporting

Export PDF prints every sheet in the pack, plan and elevations together with the unit schedule, in millimetres, centimetres, metres, inches or feet and inches. Each elevation can also be downloaded on its own as SVG, which opens in any vector editor and can be marked up by hand. Both are free on every plan, with no paid tier for drawings, and stay downloadable after editing ends. See the plan page for what the rest of the pack contains.

Questions

How this page was made

Both drawings on this page are unedited exports of the planner's L-shaped starter layout on 18 September 2026. The conventions table describes the drawings as they are generated; if the drawings change, this page is updated with them.

Sources

Plan & Setout Sheet · the floor plan these elevations belong to
Kitchen layout dimensions and clearances · the heights an elevation is checked against

Written by the person who builds the planner, who is not a kitchen designer or an electrician: the guides say where a professional or a local code decides. Found a mistake? Write to us and it will be corrected with a note on this page.

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