It’s the big day, and soon you’ll be moving into a new house. It’s got more square footage, a mammoth master bathroom and more storage than you can use. But before you move into that sweet new pad, you’ve got to figure out where your furniture is going to fit, and how. Going around the place and making a floor plan with a tape measure and a pad of paper is tedious though. If only there was a better option.
And yes, there is. Well, that’s what MagicPlan is here for, anyways. Using just your iPhone’s camera, you can map out your entire place, and create a final floor plan, all in the palm of your hand. But is it any good? Let’s take a few minutes and find out, shall we?
How It Works
If you think about the place you live, whether it’s your apartment, house, or the crawlspace underneath your neighbor’s shed, there are lots of different components other than just four walls and a door. There are closets, cabinets, moldings, arches and more, all of which give you a certain amount of square footage to put your furniture and stuff. To find out how much room you have, MagicPlan uses the camera in the iPhone to determine where each component of the room meet up, then creates a diagram of the space. Confused yet?
See that green line? That's important.
Take a look at the picture above. That vertical green line up there with the crows feet at the bottom is how MagicPlan does its magic. You stand in the middle of the room, and turn either clockwise or counterclockwise. At each bend in the room, you align the green line with the connection, tap the screen to lock in the location then move on to the next. If it’s a door, you add the door and which way it opens. Closets work the same way, although I didn’t see anything about adding windows. Once you’re all done, you get an overhead floor plan of the room, complete with dimensions.
How Well Does It Work?
Conveniently enough, I happened to be moving around the time this app came out, and my wife and I wanted to figure out where everything would fit in our new place. Since she’s a kitchen cabinet designer, her attention to detail on these kind of things is pretty high, so I figured it would be a good test of the app. I’d walk around the house with MagicPlan, while she went with a tape measure and a pad of paper. I love it when a plan comes together.
Pick the room, then scan away to get your layout.
I started off by picking a room — my future office — and stood as close to the center as possible. About five minutes later, I had the entire room scanned and I was presented with my floor plan. Now at this point, I could make any adjustments I needed to, like enter in measurements I had taken with a tape measure, or readjust any of the lines if they weren’t connected correctly. Now I just had to do the rest of the house.
The Results
So how well did it work? I didn’t end up measuring the entire house, just three of the rooms that I needed to figure out what furniture I was going to use. At the end of it all, I had three rooms that, by just using MagicPlan, were perfectly diagrammed. The measurements though, not so much.
Pivot and move around different rooms to connect them all together.
Each wall was pretty consistently 6 inches shorter on MagicPlan than our actual measurements. Now I’m not sure exactly why that is, but each time, same result — almost uncanny, and a bit disappointing.
So Why Recommend This Thing?
I’m a bit OCD, so before I move or setup an office, I usually use some kind of room layout program to get the floor plan, then I put together where each piece of furniture or equipment needs to go. Before I became a Mac user, my go-to program was Visio, but now I don’t have many options that I really like. Even when I used Visio, it would take me hours to measure, layout and input in each wall, and the results were often off just a little bit.
View the property on a map, which uses the iPhone's GPS.
MagicPlan makes the input and layout substantially faster. What used to take hours, now takes an hour at the most, even if the numbers aren’t 100-percent correct. And verifying measurements is a lot faster than measuring once, typing it into a program and adjusting as necessary. That means that by scanning the rooms first with MagicPlan then verifying everything with a tape measure, I still get the job done quicker overall.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, the app isn’t perfect, but I think with some fine tuning it may be just right. Even in its current state, it’s easy enough to use that it makes the floor plan process straightforward.
If you need your floor plan to be absolutely accurate, you should probably draw it out on graph paper and measure each wall individually. But if not, or even if you just want to do it quicker, then MagicPlan should work out just fine. In the end, it was still a valuable tool in my move, which is why I’d recommend it to others.