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. 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.

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.