Can I have several floor plan drawings going at once?
One home you live in. Several drawings you're weighing up: a house you're viewing, a dream renovation, an old plan you want to compare against. They shouldn't sit on top of each other — they should be able to sit alongside each other, each on its own.
Short answer: Yes, a good floor plan app should be able to keep several drawings separate from each other, each with its own name, its own rooms and its own measurements — just as it keeps several scanned homes separate. You don't need to "finish" a drawing or commit to it before starting the next one. That opens up the drawing board for more than one purpose: documenting a home you live in, sketching a renovation you're weighing up, or comparing two homes you're viewing, without any of them interfering with the others.
Why it matters to be able to have several drawings on the go
Most people who draw a home don't do it just once, for a single purpose. Typical situations where you need more than one drawing:
- You're weighing up a renovation and want to see how the house would look if a wall were moved — without losing the drawing of the house as it looks today. Two versions, the same house.
- You're comparing several homes you're considering moving to or bidding on. Each home is its own drawing, with its own name, so you don't mix up one living room's measurements with another's.
- You're drawing for someone else. A friend who needs help planning a room. The family's holiday cottage. A rental you're considering.
- You're starting over, because the first drawing went too skewed or wrong somewhere, and it's quicker to begin again than to fix it. The old one doesn't need to be deleted to make room for the new.
What all these situations have in common: none of them require you to choose. You just need to be able to name each drawing and find it again.
What "separate" actually means in practice
Drawings being separate means more than each simply having its own name. It means nothing from one drawing leaks into another:
- Rooms and measurements are local to the drawing. Change a room's size in drawing A, and nothing happens to the equivalent room in drawing B, even if the two homes look alike.
- Ceiling heights, materials and furniture belong to the individual drawing. Two homes can have a different ceiling height in the "same" room, if they're two different houses.
- They're built up separately. Press "build the house" on one drawing, and only that one turns into a real house in the app, with 3D and takeoffs — the other drawings stay drawings until you do the same to them.
Without that separation, an app with several drawings would quickly become confusing: a fix in one project could accidentally change another, and you'd never quite be able to trust which version of a figure you were looking at.
Are drawings saved, or do they disappear when the app closes?
A drawing should be saved the same way as everything else important in an app — automatically, continuously, without you having to remember to press "save". The practical question is rather where it's saved, and whether it follows you if you switch device.
Most apps that handle personal data on an iPhone or iPad use one of two models:
- Local to the device only. Data sits in the app's own storage on the phone. Delete the app, or switch phones without a transfer, and the data disappears with it.
- Synced through a cloud service, typically tied to your Apple account or similar. Data follows you when you sign in on a new device, and a deletion on one device syncs (after a moment) to the others.
The difference matters if you use both an iPhone and an iPad, or if your phone is lost or replaced. If the data is local only, it's lost with the device. If it's synced through your private account, you can retrieve it again on a new device, without anyone but you having had access to it along the way.
How many drawings and homes can you have?
This is typically where the difference between free and paid tiers in an app lies — not in whether you can draw, but in how many homes you can have on hand at once. A free tier often allows only one home at a time, while paid tiers allow several, or unlimited. It's worth checking, before you invest time drawing a third home, whether the app actually lets you keep all three, or whether the oldest gets locked or has to be deleted to make room for the new one.
What happens to a drawing you don't touch for a long time?
In a properly built app, nothing happens — a drawing you haven't opened in six months is still there, unchanged, the day you come back to it. There's no good reason for an app to delete or alter a drawing you haven't touched on its own. If you're unsure whether a particular app cleans up old projects automatically, it's a question worth asking before you put important measurements into it — especially if the drawing is your only source for a house's measurements.
The difference between a "drawing" and a "home" in the archive
It's worth keeping the two concepts apart, because they behave differently. A drawing on the drawing board is a draft — lines, rooms and measurements you can still change in broad strokes, without affecting anything else. Press the button that turns it into a real home in the app, and a shift happens: from that point the home is part of your archive alongside a scanned home, with its own area, its own 3D model and its own takeoff, and further editing happens just as it would for any other home in the app — no longer as a loose sketch.
That also means you can happily leave a drawing sitting as a draft for as long as you like, without it "using up" one of your home slots in the subscription. It's only once the drawing is turned into a real home that it counts towards the limit on how many homes you can have.
Can several people work on the same drawing?
Most apps in this category are built for one user at a time, tied to one private account — a drawing isn't a shared document that two people edit at once, the way a shared spreadsheet can be. If you want someone else's input on a drawing, the practical solution is typically to export it as a PDF or image and send it, or to share a finished home through a dedicated sharing feature, if the app has one. If you both need to be able to edit directly in the drawing itself, it's worth checking specifically whether the app supports that before you count on it — it isn't a given.
What HouseSense does
In HouseSense, your drawings sit in their own archive, separate from each other and from the houses you've scanned — you can have several going at once, each with its own name, and return to any of them from the front page under "Drawings" or "Open previous drawings". They come along in your private iCloud, so they're available across your own devices without anyone but you having access to them. How many homes you can have in total — drawn and scanned combined — depends on your subscription tier: Free gives you one, Private gives you five, and Estate gives you unlimited. That's the only limit that's set — the act of drawing, saving and building a home isn't restricted by tier.