No floor plan? There's an app for that: MagicPlan

In a rural area like ours, the floor plans and construction drawings of many houses  have not survived two world wars and the various smaller disasters, like fire or flooding, or inexplicable bureaucratic mishaps. The floor plans of our house, for example, disappeared in 1938 when they were transferred from the county to the regional planning authority.

So, we measured with tape measure, but shouldn't there be an app for that?

If you work with building interiors as a builder, interior designer or in any capacity that entails work with floor plans, the blogster has a favorite app, MagicPlan.
It allows you to make floor plans for individual rooms or complete houses by taking a series of pictures with your smartphone and letting the app to the math.

The company website lists three steps:
1) Take pictures of your room's corners.
2) Fine tune the room.
3) Repeat and assemble into a foor plan.

There are some limitations on how you work and on precision, so for high precision work in very small rooms, keep the old tape measure. Obviously, if your habitat does not have corners, you are out of luck.

Pacing around in a room while taking picture of the corners is also not an option, although they are apparently working one that.

For now, you pick a spot and stand in that same spot while grabbing the corners. Think of it as being your own surveyor's tripod. Not being allowed to move around explains the issues with rooms that have complex shapes, i.e. shapes where not all angles are visible from a single point in the room.

Of course, you can add objects or mark reference points on the plan, which is why the makers of MagicPlan have a CSI version. It certainly sounds better the image of a police officer drawing an ad hoc floor plan on a small notepad.

An unanswered question about the 'CSI' version is whether modifications are logged to show potential later tampering. But that's more for authors of detective novels to worry about than for regular builders or home improvement workers.

Another app by the maker, Sensopia, is MagicMeasure, hailed as a digital tape measure. We have not tried it out.

It does get even fancier than 2D plans with Floorplaner's 3D plans based on MagicPlan.
Wouldn't it be cool if you could feed the data to a 3D printer to produce a wall segment that needs repair?

If the apps work on very small scales, a project with a lot more immediate potential could be reproductions of antique doll houses.

Note: We have no relationship with any of these companies and are not getting paid to write about their products.