Can a floor plan app show multiple floors?
A house with a basement, a ground floor and an attic is not one flat drawing — it is several layers stacked on top of each other. Most floor plan apps solve this by showing one floor at a time, but the basement often only comes along if you actively add it.
Short answer: Yes. Most digital floor plan apps handle a multi-storey house by storing each floor as its own layer and letting you switch between them, rather than squeezing every room into one drawing. The basement usually only comes along if it has been scanned or drawn as its own floor — it doesn't automatically follow the rest of the house.
Why you don't just draw every floor in one image
A house with two or three storeys has rooms stacked directly on top of each other — a living room on the ground floor may have a bedroom right above it. Draw both into the same surface and the lines, measurements and room names overlap until the drawing becomes unreadable. That's why nearly every floor plan app keeps floors separate as distinct layers: you see one floor at a time, and a menu item or tab lets you switch to the next.
How you switch between floors in a digital floor plan
Most apps show a small floor picker — often a list or a dropdown with "Ground floor", "First floor", "Basement" and similar — placed in a fixed spot on the screen, so you don't have to navigate away from the drawing to switch. The ground floor is usually the one shown first, because it's the one people look up most often.
Why the basement is often missing from the plan
The basement is often the floor that gets forgotten or skipped — partly because it's harder to scan (lower ceilings, more technical installations in the way) and partly because it isn't always counted in the home's official floor area. If you're using a scan-based app, the basement only comes along if you have actually scanned it as its own floor. No app guesses at a room it hasn't seen.
How to get the basement onto the plan
- Scan the basement on its own, as a separate floor, if the app supports multiple floors.
- Draw it by hand if the basement is hard to scan — lots of pipework and low ceilings often make automatic recognition unreliable there.
- Check whether the app's floor picker actually lists the basement as an option, before assuming it's missing for technical reasons.
What a "whole house" overview shows — and doesn't show
Some apps also offer a combined overview, where all floors are shown stacked in 3D or offset from each other in a diagram. That's good for understanding the overall shape of the house, but it doesn't replace the floor-by-floor drawing if you need measurements for a single room — for that you still need to open the individual floor.
What multiple floors mean for the total area
A home's total area is the sum of the areas of every floor it has been drawn with — not just the floor currently shown on screen. If you've only scanned or drawn the ground floor, the app will only show the ground floor's area, even though the house actually has more storeys. It's worth checking before you compare an area figure from an app with a figure from a sales listing or the public building register, which usually covers the whole home.
Do the floors need to be scanned in one go, or can you do them separately?
Most apps that build floor plans from a scan let you scan one floor at a time and add it to the house afterwards — you don't have to walk through every room in a single session. That's practical in a multi-storey house, where you might scan the living room one day and the attic another, or where a room was full of moving boxes and needs redoing later. Each floor becomes its own part of the house, and they're combined into the overall overview once all of them have been added.
What if a house has a floor that can't be scanned with LiDAR?
A floor the app can't scan — because the phone lacks LiDAR, say, or because the room is too technical or too cluttered for automatic recognition — can usually still be drawn by hand and added as its own floor, just like the rest of the house. That doesn't give you the same automatic accuracy as a scan, but it keeps the floor in the overall overview instead of leaving it out entirely.
But don't two floors stacked on top of each other just look the same on the plan?
Rarely. Most multi-storey houses have different room layouts from floor to floor — an open living room on the ground floor might sit beneath two closed-off bedrooms, or a garage beneath an entirely different pattern of rooms. Even in houses where the floors resemble each other closely, the staircase, the chimney or any skylights will usually break the pattern somewhere. That's why it's rarely enough to draw one floor and reuse it for the others — each floor needs to be measured or scanned on its own, precisely because they're rarely identical, even if they look alike at first glance.
How does a floor plan show where the stairs connect the floors?
The staircase is typically drawn as a row of parallel lines with an arrow showing the direction up or down, and a break in the drawing where the stairs "cut through" the floor above — the open gap the stairs run through is marked as an unbroken edge with no floor. On the floor the stairs lead up to, the same stair run is often shown as a dashed outline, marking where the hole in the floor is, even though it isn't part of the floor you're actually looking at.
Do all floors count towards the home's official area?
Not necessarily. What an app shows as "multiple floors" is simply the layers you've chosen to scan or draw — it isn't automatically the same as the categories a public building register uses to calculate a home's area. A basement or an unfinished attic, for instance, may be drawn perfectly well in the app without being counted in the official living area, because registers often have their own rules for when a room below ground or under a sloped ceiling counts. If you need an area figure for an official purpose, it's the register's figure that applies — not the app's.
What HouseSense does
HouseSense shows multi-storey houses as separate layers, with a floor picker and an option to view "The whole house" in one overview. The ground floor is always shown first. If a house has a basement or an attic, it only appears on the drawing if it has been scanned or drawn as its own floor — exactly as with any other floor plan method.
How to plan a scan of a multi-storey house
- Finish scanning one floor at a time. Don't start on the second floor before the first is saved and looks right.
- Start with the ground floor. Most apps show it first, and it gives you a reference the other floors can be checked against.
- Include the basement and the attic even though they're awkward. They're the floors most often skipped — and the hardest to go back to later.
- Check the combined overview at the end, and look for whether stairs, chimneys and outer walls line up from floor to floor.