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How long does it take to draw your home instead of scanning it?

Budget around an hour per floor for measuring and 20-40 minutes to enter it into the app — and expect it to halve the second time you do it.

The time, room by room

An ordinary room needs a handful of measurements: the room's two sides, the diagonal, the wall thickness, the width of the door and window plus their distance from the nearest corner, and the ceiling height. With a tape measure this takes 6-10 minutes per room if you write everything down on the spot. With a laser distance meter, 3-5 minutes.

Five rooms plus a hallway and a bathroom add up to:

• 7 rooms × 8 minutes = 56 minutes with a tape measure.
• 7 rooms × 4 minutes = 28 minutes with a laser.

Add ten minutes for the house's outer measurements and for the sanity check where the rooms plus walls must add up to the house's internal width. That puts a floor at 40-70 minutes.

What makes the time explode

• Walking back. Every forgotten measurement costs five minutes, because you have to find the tape measure, walk over, and work out where you measured from last time. Take every measurement in one pass, one room at a time.
• Measuring alone without a laser. A 5 m tape that needs to be held down at one end of a living room costs time and gives worse numbers. Weigh the end down with something heavy, or buy the laser.
• Typing it in later without an ordered note. Write the measurements on a sketch of the room — not in a list. A list of 42 numbers with no drawing is useless two days later.
• Drawing while you measure. Tempting, but slower. Measure everything first, draw afterwards.

Comparison: what does a scan cost in time?

A LiDAR scan of a room takes a few minutes, and a whole floor can be scanned in about a quarter of an hour. But the scan isn't free of time afterwards: the rooms often need straightening out, naming and reviewing, and the spots where the scanner missed a niche or a chimney breast need to be caught.

The real difference is therefore not "a quarter of an hour against two hours" — but it is still large enough that scanning wins clearly when you don't already know the home. If you know it, and have an old floor plan to work from, drawing it is often just as fast.

LiDAR sits in the Pro models of iPhone and iPad, not in every device. If your device doesn't have it, the home can be drawn instead — HouseSense supports that on any iPhone and iPad.

How to cut the time down

1. Sketch the floor out on paper before you measure. Ten minutes spent on a sketch with room for numbers saves two trips around the house.
2. Measure in a fixed order in each room — the same round every time, clockwise from the door. That way you don't forget a wall.
3. Use one zero point per wall. Besides being more accurate, it's faster: you don't move the end of the tape for every measurement.
4. Measure the wall thickness once per type, not in every room. Exterior wall at a window reveal, partition wall at a door reveal.
5. Take 6-8 photos per room in the same round. They cost a minute and save you a trip back to check which way the door swings open.

Entering it: where the time actually goes

Drawing the plan up takes 20-40 minutes per floor the first time, and usually half that the second time. Two things decide how fast it goes:

• Whether the measurements can be typed as numbers. If you have to hit 4.12 m by dragging with your finger, the time goes on zooming and nudging. In HouseSense you drag the room's shape out and type the measurement in whole centimetres — the drawing adjusts itself to the number.
• Whether walls snap together. When two neighbouring rooms share a wall, the two walls become one, and you neither need to close a gap by hand nor count the same centimetres twice.

Once the plan is in place, what would otherwise be an evening with a calculator comes free: area per room and per floor, a takeoff for contractor quotes with floor, wall and ceiling areas plus skirting lengths, a 3D model and PDF reports.

A realistic estimate for a whole house

A two-storey house with 10 rooms in total:

• Measuring with a tape measure: 1.5-2 hours.
• Entering it: 45-70 minutes.
• Checking measurements and tidying up: 20 minutes.

A total of 2.5-3.5 hours for a measured floor plan of the whole house — done once, and you have it. That's an afternoon, and you need neither a scanner nor a professional to get through it.

One thing neither the time nor the drawing can give you: the answer to whether a wall is load-bearing. That requires a building surveyor or an engineer on site.