How to Generate a Repair Cost Estimate from a Floor Plan Scan

Every repair estimate starts with two things: how much of each material is involved (the takeoff) and what each unit costs (your price book). The takeoff is usually the tedious part — measuring walls, multiplying by ceiling height for drywall and paint, totaling room areas for flooring, and running perimeters for baseboard.

When the floor plan comes from a LiDAR scan, those quantities are already computed. vPlan AR turns a scanned plan plus a few damage tags into a line-item estimate, priced with your own rates, and exports it to PDF or CSV.

What a Takeoff Needs (and Where the Numbers Come From)

A scan gives you each room's floor area, perimeter, and — with ceiling height — its wall area. From those, the quantities most repair estimates need fall out automatically: flooring and ceiling from floor area, drywall and insulation from wall area, paint from walls plus ceiling, and trim or baseboard from the perimeter.

The estimate is driven by the damage you tag, so you only pay to repair what was actually affected — not the whole building. Items that aren't geometry-based, like cabinetry or fixtures, come through as line items you can price per unit.

Step 1 — Tag the Affected Materials per Room

In the editor, open each affected room and select its affected materials — drywall, flooring, carpet, ceiling, insulation, baseboard, paint, and more. This is the same per-room tagging that powers the damage/scope report, so a single pass produces both documents.

Only rooms with tagged materials appear in the estimate, and each material becomes a line with a quantity pulled from that room's geometry.

Step 2 — Set Your Unit Prices

vPlan AR ships with a default rate card so you get a usable number immediately, but the prices are yours to control. Open Settings and edit the Estimate Rate Card — set your real cost per square foot for drywall, flooring, paint, per linear foot for baseboard, and per-unit allowances for the rest. Set a waste/contingency percentage too.

Your rates are saved to your account and reused across every project, so you tune them once. Cost estimating is a Pro and Business feature.

Step 3 — Export the Estimate (PDF or CSV)

Tap Export and choose Repair Cost Estimate in the iOS app, or Cost Estimate in the web editor (where rooms with finishes also get priced flooring, paint and baseboard lines; see how the takeoff works). The PDF groups line items by room with quantities, unit prices, and totals, then adds a subtotal, your waste/contingency, and a grand total. Choose CSV instead and you get a flat spreadsheet you can drop into your own bid template or accounting system.

Because the estimate and the scope-of-work report come from the same scan and the same tags, the numbers and the narrative always agree.

A Worked Example: One Water-Damaged Bedroom

Here is how the math works on a single room. Say a scan measures a bedroom at 12 ft × 14 ft with an 8 ft ceiling. The scan gives you a floor area of 168 sq ft, a perimeter of 52 linear feet, and a gross wall area of about 416 sq ft (52 ft × 8 ft, before any deductions for doors and windows).

You tag the room with carpet, baseboard, drywall and paint as affected materials. With illustrative rates of $4.50/sq ft for carpet, $3.00/lf for baseboard, $2.75/sq ft for drywall and $1.25/sq ft for paint, the line items come out to $756 for flooring (168 × $4.50), $156 for baseboard (52 × $3.00), $1,144 for drywall (416 × $2.75) and $520 for paint (416 × $1.25) — a $2,576 subtotal. A 10% waste/contingency brings the total to $2,833.60.

Those rates are placeholders to show the arithmetic, not market prices — your own rate card is what makes the number real. The point is that every quantity came from the scan, so nobody had to measure a wall or multiply anything by hand.

Tuning Your Rate Card

A rate card is only useful if it reflects what jobs actually cost you. Decide up front whether each rate is material-only or installed (material plus labor) and keep that consistent across the card — mixing the two is the most common reason estimates come in low.

Price for your region and revisit the card when supplier prices move; a quarterly check is enough for most shops. Keep the waste/contingency percentage honest: many contractors use somewhere between 5% and 15% depending on the material and how much cutting the job involves.

For items that do not scale with geometry — a vanity, a light fixture, an electrical allowance — use per-unit allowances rather than trying to force them into a per-square-foot rate.

Rough Estimate, Firm Bid or Carrier Estimate?

A scan-driven estimate is ideal for a same-day rough number: it tells a homeowner or property manager the order of magnitude while you are still on site. For a firm bid, export the CSV and refine it in your own bid template — add mobilization, permits, disposal and anything specific to the job.

On insurance work, the carrier or adjuster will usually write the final estimate in their estimating platform. Your scan-based estimate and scope report still matter: they document quantities and conditions independently, which is what you need when you are negotiating a supplement. See how restoration contractors and general contractors use the same workflow.

How Accurate Is It?

The quantities are as accurate as the scan, which for LiDAR is within a couple of percent on typical rooms — far better than pacing or eyeballing. The dollar figure is only as good as your rate card, which is exactly why the prices are editable. Treat the output as a fast, defensible rough estimate that gets you to a bid in minutes instead of hours; refine the rates and allowances for a firm quote.

For property-loss work, pair the estimate with the scope-of-work report so the adjuster sees both what happened and what it costs to put right — whether that's a water damage claim or a fire and smoke damage claim. Public adjusters build the same pairing when presenting a case to the carrier on the policyholder's behalf.