Moving into a new place and not sure the sofa will fit? You can try out a furniture layout on your phone before the van arrives. PlainPlan lets you trace the floor plan from the listing and set it to scale. Then you can drop in furniture and resize, rotate, and label each piece. Treat the result as a guide and not a promise. The app says its plans are approximate, and a listing plan can be off too.

You don’t need an account and there is nothing to unlock. Every tool is there from the start.

Trace the listing floor plan

  1. Save or screenshot the floor plan from the listing. A photo of a paper plan from the agent works too.
  2. Install PlainPlan and pick metric or imperial.
  3. Put the photo under the drawing.
  4. Find one distance you know, such as a room width printed on the plan. Use it to set the scale.
  5. Lower the opacity so the image sits behind your lines.
  6. Drag to draw walls over the image. Corners join on their own, and walls snap to straight and 45° angles. For a plain rectangular room, the room tool drags out all four walls at once.
  7. Add doors, sliding doors, windows, and open passages. They snap into the walls. One tap flips the swing or the hinge side. Door swings matter here. It’s better to find out now that a door will hit the bed.

If you get a viewing before you move, measure one wall with a tape and type that length in. You can rescale the whole drawing from that one wall.

Place your furniture

  1. Open the furniture library. It has 45 items, including beds, sofas, tables, desks, stairs, kitchen and bathroom fixtures, and a car.
  2. Drag a piece into a room. Measure your own sofa and bed, then resize the pieces to match. The default sizes are unlikely to match what you own.
  3. Rotate each piece and drag it around until it fits. Pinch to zoom and pan with two fingers.
  4. Label the pieces so you know which is which, such as “grey sofa” or “spare room desk”.
  5. Use the measure tool to check the gaps between things, like the walkway between the bed and the wall. It measures any distance, not only walls.
  6. Undo and redo go back one step at a time, so trying a new arrangement is cheap.

To compare two layouts, export a PNG of the first one, then rearrange and export again.

For a home with more than one level, keep every floor in the same plan. Each floor gets its own page.

Share it with the people helping you move

  • A PNG is easy to send in a message to family or the movers.
  • A PDF at a true scale such as 1:50 or 1:100 includes a scale bar and room areas. Print it and tape it up by the front door on moving day.
  • You can also print straight from the app.

The plan saves after every change. A phone call while you are arranging the bedroom won’t lose it. To move the plan to another phone, back it up as one .plan file and import it there.

When to measure instead

A layout traced from a listing is fine for deciding where the sofa goes. It’s the wrong starting point for ordering a fitted wardrobe, a made-to-measure rug, or kitchen units. For those, measure the room on site and work from your own numbers.

PlainPlan has no internet permission, no ads, no analytics, and no tracking. The plan leaves your phone only when you share it.

Get PlainPlan on Google Play