Turn a hand-drawn sketch into a real floor plan

A CAD-drawn PDF has clean parallel lines and consistent line weights. A hand sketch has none of that: walls wobble, corners do not close, a door is three strokes, and the whole thing is out of proportion because you ran out of paper on the right-hand side.

So Draftie treats a sketch as a statement of intent rather than a measured drawing. It works out the topology (which rooms exist, what adjoins what, where the openings are) and then rebuilds that as straight, closed, orthogonal geometry at whatever scale you calibrate it to. What comes back is not a traced copy of your wobbles. It is the plan you were trying to draw.

That is also why the proportions may need correcting afterwards, and why doing so is quick: a wall drag with live millimetres is a two-second fix, and it is the same fix you would have made on a perfect trace anyway.

The thing to calibrate your expectations against is this: the room layout will almost always be right, and the dimensions will almost always need a pass. Getting the layout right is the slow part when you do it by hand, and it is the part this removes.

None of this is required, and all of it helps.

• Draw walls as single lines or as two parallel lines: both read fine, but be consistent within one drawing.
• Close your rooms. A gap in a wall reads as a doorway, which may be what you want and may not.
• Write room names in. Draftie reads them, so “BED 2” comes back as a bedroom rather than as an unnamed space.
• Write in any dimensions you know. They get read as numbers and used.
• Mark doors with the usual quarter-arc if you can. A plain gap becomes an opening rather than a hung door.
• Use a pen rather than a hard pencil. Contrast is what the models see, and faint 2H pencil on cream paper is the most common reason a sketch reads badly.
• One storey per sketch. If you have two, photograph them separately.

Four failure modes account for almost everything, and all four are quick to fix.

• Rooms merged into one. Two rooms came back as one because the wall between them had a gap in it. Draw the missing wall in the editor, or close the gap and re-scan.
• Everything is the wrong size. The calibration reference was wrong or mistyped. Re-calibrate against a longer dimension you are confident about.
• Walls at slight angles. The sketch was photographed at an angle and the perspective correction under-shot. Re-shoot square-on; it is faster than straightening walls one at a time.
• Rooms unnamed. Nothing was written in them, or the writing was too small to read. Re-type them in the editor, it is a dropdown per room, not a text field.

The sketch stops being a picture and becomes a plan that knows things about itself. Rooms are typed, so it can tell a wet area from a bedroom. Walls have thicknesses. Openings know which wall they belong to.

From there you can drag walls with live millimetre dimensions, drop in doors, windows and furniture, and specify every floor, wall and benchtop from real Australian product ranges with SKUs, plank sizes and slip ratings attached.

It also starts checking itself. Room widths, circulation, door clearances and garage sizing are tested against NCC and Queensland Development Code rules as you edit, so a bedroom that has ended up 2,400mm wide tells you before a building surveyor does.