Rooms & walls
Create and arrange rooms with the Room tool, step into wall editing for the full reshaping toolset - Line, Knife, Extrude and friends - and keep rooms valid.
Walls are the backbone of every drawing, and rooms are the closed loops they form. This page covers creating and arranging rooms, the complete wall-editing toolset, and how rooms stay valid.
The Room tool
The Room tool is home base for creating and arranging rooms. It opens on its Pointer default, which is for getting around and organising your layout:
- Drag empty canvas to pan around your drawing.
- Tap a room to select it.
- Drag a selected room to move it. Rooms snap into place as you drag, and the app offers to connect rooms that line up against each other.
- Rotate, flip and delete a selected room from the buttons down the right-hand side. The Properties button there styles the room’s name label - its size, angle and position on the plan.
- Tap a room’s name label to rename the room on the spot.
When you want to draw, the Room tool gives you three drawing tools alongside the Pointer:
| Drawing tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Box | Drag out a rectangular room, or tap to drop a default-sized room (3 m × 3 m) centred on where you tapped. A live measurement overlay tracks the size as you drag. |
| Box Set | Build a room to an exact width × height. |
| Shapes | Drop a ready-made room outline, Rectangle, L, U or T (see below). |
All three drawing tools are one-shot: as soon as you finish drawing, the tool hands back to the Pointer so you can carry straight on panning and arranging. (Need a single wall rather than a whole room? The Line tool lives in wall editing - see Editing walls.)
With a room selected, two more buttons join the palette:
- Walls steps into wall editing for that room (see Editing walls).
- Connections shows how rooms join along shared walls, with one-tap repairs (see Multi-room & floors).
Drawing a box always makes a new room, or fills in an empty one you’ve already added, so there’s no “new room or add to existing?” question to answer. You just get a room.
While you draw, a small crosshair appears just up and to the side of your fingertip - on the side that matches your handedness setting - so the contact point isn’t hidden under your finger; the shape commits exactly at the crosshair. (On a Mac the pointer is already precise, so there’s no offset.)
As you draw, endpoints snap to nearby corners and wall midpoints and into alignment with existing walls - a small green marker shows exactly what you’ve snapped to - so geometry meets cleanly. A room’s name and floor area appear at its centre once its outline closes.
Predefined room shapes
The Shapes drawing tool drops a complete room outline in one go, so you don’t have to draw every wall by hand:
- Rectangle, a simple four-wall room.
- L, U and T, ready-made angled outlines for stepped and recessed rooms.
As with the other drawing tools, the Room tool returns to the Pointer once the shape is placed, ready for you to nudge it into position.
Wall thickness comes from layers
A wall has no single “thickness” field, its thickness is the sum of its material layers. A wall with no layer data uses the default stack (plasterboard 12.5 mm · timber stud 75 mm · plasterboard 12.5 mm = 100 mm). Editing the stack changes the wall’s drawn thickness instantly. See Wall materials & layers for the full layer system.
Wall length is always measured across the whole wall, start to end, a 4 m wall with a 1 m door in it is still 4 m long.
Editing walls
Wall editing lives one level down from the Room tool: select a room, then tap Walls. There’s no extra mode to switch on - the moment you’re in, blue handles appear at the middle of the room’s walls and the wall actions line up beside the canvas. Tap Back to return to the Room tool when you’re done.
Tap a wall to select it: the selected wall gets an accent halo over its line, so it’s always clear which wall the actions will affect. Selecting a wall also brings up its materials - in the side panel on iPad and Mac, or via the Properties button on iPhone (see Wall materials & layers). Drag a wall by its handle, perpendicular to itself, to move it: connected corners follow automatically, a red tape measures how far you’ve moved, and with snap on the drag clicks over 100 mm steps and locks exactly into line with nearby walls. Tap empty canvas (or the ✕) to deselect; switching tools tidies up automatically. You can switch the active room at any time from the top room pill, even while you’re editing walls.
Walls always render with clean mitred corners - where two walls of any thickness meet, the join is filled neatly, at right angles and oblique angles alike. The same crisp corners carry through to your exported PDF.
Drag a corner to reshape an angle
Whenever you’re in wall editing with no action armed, a green dot sits at every corner of the active room. Drag a corner to move it, and every wall meeting there follows - the quick way to form any angle by eye, the hands-on counterpart to the numeric Set angle tool. As you drag, a small arc and a live angle reading (like “112°”) appear at each corner so you can see the shape forming. Corners snap to nearby corners and gridlines as you go.
The corner grips appear only when no wall action is armed - arm Line, Knife, Extrude or any other tool and they step aside, since those tools work from the blue mid-wall handles. A corner that sits on a connected shared wall can’t be dragged this way (moving one room’s copy would tear the shared wall apart) - disconnect the rooms first. Doors, windows, lights and radiators on the reshaped walls move along with them.
The wall actions are:
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Line | Draw a single wall: tap its start and end (or press and drag), with a live pill showing the length and angle as you go. A line drawn inside a finished room becomes a free-standing partition - see below. |
| Knife | Tap to arm, then tap a wall to cut it in two at that point. Each half keeps the original wall’s materials; doors, windows, lights and radiators stay with whichever half they sit on. |
| Extrude | Drag a wall and new bridge walls fill in behind the move. Pull outward to grow the room, or inward to notch it - the quick way to turn a box into an L or U. Inward pulls stop just short of the far side, so a room can’t fold through itself. The result lands clean and square: a corner the move leaves within a couple of degrees of a right angle snaps to exactly 90° (anything further off is treated as deliberate and stays), and one undo rewinds the whole move. |
| Move By | Enter a value in your chosen unit (m, ft, mm or feet-and-inches) and Add/Subtract to shift a wall perpendicular to itself by an exact amount. |
| Fuse | The inverse of Knife: merge a wall with a straight-on neighbour that shares an endpoint (within ~10°). Openings and devices on the removed wall re-attach automatically. |
| Delete | Remove a wall, but only if the room still forms a simple closed loop afterwards (or was already invalid). Attached doors, windows and openings are removed with it - radiators too; lights detach; the boundary is regenerated. |
| Square Up | Make a corner’s angle exactly 90°. The shorter of the two walls rotates; the longer one is pinned so the rest of the room is undisturbed. (Handles simple two-wall corners.) |
| Set angle | Tap a corner and type the exact interior angle you want - Square Up’s free-angle cousin. |
Square Up and Set angle leave corners on a connected shared wall alone (disconnect the rooms first) - rotating one room’s copy would tear the shared wall apart.
Moving a wall propagates correctly through corners, partner walls in connected rooms and neighbouring geometry - and when an edit leaves a wall flush against another room, the app offers to connect the rooms. See Multi-room & floors for connecting and snapping.
Free-standing partition walls
Not every wall has to be part of a room’s outline. Draw a Line inside a finished room and the app asks whether to make it a free wall - a free-standing interior partition (a stud wall, say, or a chimney breast return):
- A free wall is excluded from the room’s outline, so the room stays valid with the partition inside it, and it doesn’t count toward the room’s perimeter.
- It’s a first-class wall otherwise: it renders normally, carries its own material layers, and can host doors, windows and openings. In the 3D engine a partition renders as a two-sided wall, with trim on both faces.
- You can flip the Free wall (partition) toggle in the wall’s properties at any time. A connected shared wall can’t be a partition - it belongs to two rooms’ outlines.
Set an exact wall length
Select a wall and a Set length pill appears, showing that wall’s current length. Tap it to open a unit-aware dialog and type the exact length you want (in m, ft, mm or feet-and-inches).
Setting a length moves one endpoint along the wall’s current direction, so the wall’s angle is kept and only its length changes. Doors and windows on the wall keep their size and their distance from the unmoved end, so resizing a wall never slides its openings around. Lengths must fall between about 0.05 m and 30 m. The app refuses a resize that would break the room’s closed loop or move a wall that’s connected to another room, with a quick notice so you know why nothing happened.
Keeping rooms valid
A room must be a single closed loop. The Drawing health checks report:
- Degenerate walls, zero-length walls.
- Floating walls, a wall with a free endpoint not shared by any other wall. (Free-standing partitions are exempt - they’re allowed to stand alone.)
- Disconnected components, detached islands in the room.
- Not a simple closed loop, a corner with the wrong number of walls.
- Polygon mismatch, the stored boundary doesn’t match the walls.
Try to solve snaps near-coincident endpoints together, drops zero-length walls, and recovers the boundary where the geometry allows. Detached islands and self-crossing loops must be fixed by hand. Invalid rooms get a dashed amber outline and an orange pill you can tap to open Drawing health.
Empty rooms
Adding a room creates it with no walls, that’s normal (you’re about to draw into it). It’s allowed in memory but flagged invalid, and won’t block saving. Drawing health lists empty rooms with a one-tap Delete empty room if you change your mind.