Does the furniture come along when I scan my home?
Yes — a LiDAR scan picks up the larger pieces of furniture and places them on the floor plan. If you draw the home yourself, you add the furniture afterwards. Either way, furniture never counts towards the area.
Short answer: yes. When you scan with LiDAR, the larger pieces of furniture — beds, sofas, tables, wardrobes — are picked up and placed on the floor plan right where they stand. If you draw the home instead, the rooms start out empty, and you add whichever pieces of furniture you want to see. Furniture never counts towards the floor area in either case; it sits as a layer on top, and that layer can be switched off.
Why furniture is included at all
Furniture on a floor plan has one job: to show whether something can actually fit there. A 12 m² room sounds spacious, until you see that a 180 × 200 cm double bed takes up 3.6 m² and needs room on both sides.
That's why furniture is drawn in HouseSense as flat rectangles on the floor plan — that's the architect's convention, and it's a deliberate choice. A floor plan is a cross-section through the room seen from above, not an interior photo. The rectangle shows exactly what you need: how much floor the piece takes up. In the 3D model, on the other hand, the furniture has recognisable shapes, because the room needs to actually look like something there.
What a scan picks up — and what it calls it
A LiDAR scan recognises the large, clearly-defined pieces: bed, sofa, table, chair, wardrobe, fridge, cooker, toilet, sink, shower enclosure, TV. It catches them because they're big enough to have a clear shape and stand free enough to be seen.
What it rarely catches, on the other hand:
- small items — lamps, plants, waste-paper baskets, things left on a table;
- furniture pushed together, where two wardrobes merge into one;
- soft piles — laundry, cushions, a stack of blankets;
- built-in cupboards, which often just become wall, because they are the wall as far as the sensor can see.
And every so often it guesses wrong: a desk gets called a dining table, a chest of drawers gets called a wardrobe. You correct that yourself afterwards — it takes seconds, and it changes nothing about the room's measurements.
The most important rule: furniture is not geometry
A piece of furniture must never affect a room's figures. In HouseSense, the floor area is calculated from the room's walls, not from what's standing on the floor. That holds for both a scanned and a drawn home.
There's a good reason for that. Move the sofa, and the room doesn't change. Sell the house furnished or empty, and it's still the same number of square metres. And if a painter is quoting a job, it's the wall's surface that counts — not whether a bookcase stood in front of it when you scanned.
The exception to watch for: a piece of furniture standing flush against a wall can trick the scan into measuring the furniture as the wall. That leaves the room too small, and it's a geometry error, not a furniture error. Watch for it in rooms where you know there's a built-in wardrobe or a tall bookcase running the full length of a wall — and correct the wall on the drawing board using your own measurement.
When you draw: the furniture is your choice
If you draw the home on the screen's graph paper, the rooms start out empty. That's not a shortcoming — it's often an advantage, because you then draw in exactly the pieces of furniture you want to try out.
The typical use isn't to reproduce what's already there, but to test what should be there: does a 200 × 100 cm dining table fit in the new living room, with 80 cm behind the chairs? Can the bed stand under the window without covering the radiator?
Worked example: a bedroom measures 3.60 × 4.20 m. A 180 × 200 cm double bed against one wall leaves 4.20 − 2.00 = 2.20 m in front of the bed, and (3.60 − 1.80) ÷ 2 = 0.90 m on each side, if the bed is centred against the wall. 90 cm on each side is plenty for making the bed and for a 40 cm bedside table. Had the room been 3.20 m wide instead, there would only be 70 cm on each side — still workable, but a bedside table would narrow the passage to 30 cm.
Can I turn the furniture off?
Yes. The furniture sits as a layer you can toggle on and off — both on the floor plan and in the 3D model. That's handy in three situations:
- For the contractor. A takeoff for paint or flooring is easier to read without furniture. The surface areas are the same, but the drawing comes out cleaner.
- For a sale. A buyer wants to see the home's rooms, not the seller's sofa.
- For planning. If you're trying out a completely new layout, it's easier to start from an empty floor.
Should I tidy up before I scan?
Tidy up for the sake of the walls, not for the sake of the furniture. The things worth moving are the ones standing in front of a wall and distorting the room's measurements:
- pull curtains aside, so the windows and the wall behind them can be seen;
- close cupboard doors, so an open door doesn't turn into a wall in the middle of the room;
- move anything easy to move away from the wall — a drying rack, a moving box, a stack of chairs;
- leave the heavy furniture where it is. A sofa against the wall isn't a problem, as long as there's a backrest and enough clearance for the sensor to see the wall above it.
You don't need to empty the home. You just need to make sure the scan can see the surfaces the figures get calculated from.
And if the furniture is wrong?
Then correct it, or delete it. The wrong piece of furniture on a floor plan is a cosmetic problem, not a measuring problem — the areas, the wall surfaces and the contractor's takeoff are the same, regardless of whether the bookcase got labelled a wardrobe.
It's worth holding on to that distinction: furniture is allowed to be approximate, measurements are not. If you're going to spend five minutes correcting something in a scan, spend it on the walls.