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What should you not scan when measuring up your home?

Keep the scan inside what is actually yours to measure — a neighbour's garden, shared basement corridors and other people's rooms are not part of your survey.

The main rule: your surfaces, not other people's lives

A survey needs geometry. The floor plan needs to know where the walls stand, how long they are, how tall they are, and where the doors and windows sit. Everything else a scan happens to pick up along the way is surplus that does not make the drawing any better.

So the simplest guideline is this: hold the camera at chest height and let it glide along the walls. That gives you exactly what the floor plan needs, and not much more. What actually makes other people uncomfortable is rarely the survey itself — it is the phone panning slowly across desks, noticeboards and beds.

The neighbour's plot and the open windows

Scan a living room with large windows and the phone will regularly point straight out through the glass. On the other side of that glass sits the neighbour's terrace, garden or windows. The neighbour has not agreed to anything, and has had no chance to say no.

It is easy to avoid: scan from the inside, aimed inward. Angle the phone slightly downward as you pass a window, and avoid walking right up to the glass and slowly panning across the view. If you need the window's measurements, take them from the frame — not from whatever lies behind it.

The same applies outdoors if you need to measure a terrace, a shed or an outbuilding: stay on your own plot, and keep the camera pointed at your own surfaces, not at the boundary line.

Blocks of flats: the shared areas are not yours

If you live in a flat, your survey is your flat. The stairwell, the staircase, the storage cellars, the bike store and the laundry room are shared with others — and a detailed 3D scan of a stairwell with every door mapped is something most neighbours would not be happy about, if asked.

If you need a single measurement out there — the width of the stairwell opening, say, because the sofa has to go up — measure just that with a tape measure and write the number down. One measurement on a piece of paper is not the same as scanning a shared space.

Rooms where someone is living

Even in a home you own outright, there are often rooms that in practice belong to someone else. A room let to a tenant. An adult child's bedroom. The guest room, while someone is staying in it. An au pair's room.

The same rule applies here as when you walk through the front door: ask first, and say what it is for. "I am measuring the house for a quote on new windows — can I run the phone along the walls in your room?" is a question people can say yes or no to. If the answer is no, measure the four walls with a tape measure and draw the room in afterwards. The floor plan comes out exactly as accurate either way.

Five things worth leaving alone

• Noticeboards, calendars, letters and photos. There is no geometry in them, and they belong to someone else.
• Open cupboards, drawers and the medicine cabinet. If you need the cupboard's depth, just measure it.
• Screens left switched on showing someone's email or calendar. Turn them off before you scan the room.
• Keys, papers and alarm panels. Not because the scan stores pictures of them, but because they often sit out in rooms where other people have left things on display they would not want shared.
• Straight out through windows facing a neighbour. Take the window's measurements from the frame, not from the view.

What actually ends up in the file

For reassurance, and for precision: a LiDAR scan in HouseSense does not store video. What is kept is a description of the room — walls with measurements, openings with measurements, and recognised furniture types stored as simple boxes. There are no photographs in the file unless you take them yourself.

That means a scan of a stairwell does not reveal what was lying on the neighbour's doormat. But it does reveal the layout of the building, where the doors sit and the dimensions of the rooms — and that is the kind of thing you should have good reason to record before you make it. The advice to stick to your own rooms is not there because the technology is dangerous, but because it is simply decent to stick to what is yours.

Draw the rest instead of scanning it

The practical reason you can safely leave things unscanned is that there is another route to the same numbers. HouseSense can draw the home on graph paper with your finger: walls to measure, doors and windows in place, and the same areas and the same survey coming out the other end.

So the workflow becomes: scan what is actually yours. Measure everything else with a tape measure — a wall length, a door width, a ceiling height — and draw it in afterwards. Nothing in the finished floor plan reveals which rooms were scanned and which were drawn.

Where it all ends up when you are done

The survey lives on your own device and in your own private iCloud. HouseSense has no account and no server, so the scan is never uploaded anywhere, and nobody can look it up. If you want to share the home with a buyer, that only happens once you generate a code yourself — and that copy leaves out your photos and notes, and expires after 30 days.

In short

Scan your own rooms and your own surfaces. Leave the neighbour's plot, the building's shared areas and other people's rooms alone, unless you have asked. Keep the camera moving along the walls rather than sweeping over people's belongings. And where a scan does not belong, measure with a tape and draw it in afterwards — the result on the drawing is exactly the same either way.