There are two ways in. If you have not finalized a plan yet, start from the gallery: pick your city, society and plot size, choose a design, and everything else — materials, colors, storeys — is chips and sliders with the price updating live on the right. If you already have a drawing from your architect (or even a photo of a hand sketch), use Upload My Plan instead. This guide walks the upload path end to end; the gallery path is the same from step four onward.
Step 1 — Upload your drawing
On the estimator, choose Upload My Plan and add your floor plan as a JPG or PNG (one image per floor; export PDF pages as images first). A photo of a printed plan works fine if it is reasonably straight-on. Your drawing never leaves your browser — it is not uploaded to any server, so there is nothing to delete later.
Step 2 — Let the AI trace, or trace yourself
If AI detection is enabled, press Auto-detect rooms: the rooms appear as dashed amber rectangles with names and door/window counts already filled. Dashed means unverified — drag, resize, rename or delete anything that looks off, and the dashes turn solid as you touch each room. No AI, or a very rough sketch? Pick the Draw room tool and drag a rectangle over each room yourself, then name it and set its type from the list. Either way, count each room's doors and windows with the steppers — they matter, because openings are subtracted from your brickwork, plaster and paint quantities.
Step 3 — Set the scale (the step everything depends on)
An image is only pixels; the tool needs to know how many pixels make a foot. Pick the Set scale tool, drag a line along one wall whose real length you know — almost every plan prints dimensions like 30'-0" along the plot edge — type that length in feet, and confirm. That single ratio converts every rectangle you traced into real dimensions: room sizes, wall areas, covered area, all of it. Two tips: use the longest dimension you can find, because a small tracing error over 30 feet distorts far less than over 3 feet; and if the AI spotted a printed dimension, it will offer it to you — review the line it drew before accepting. The estimate stays locked until scale is set, deliberately: without it, every number would be fiction.
Step 4 — Floors, then extrude
Add your first floor with its own image (or trace it over the grid) — upper floors inherit the ground floor's scale automatically. The running readout shows your total traced covered area, checked live against what your society allows on your plot; an over-limit warning flags it without blocking you. Then press Continue: your plan extrudes into a 3D model you can orbit — your actual room layout as walls and slabs, with the mumty sitting over wherever you traced the stairs.
Step 5 — Configure and read the estimate
Now it is the same game as the gallery: city, society, plot, complete versus grey-only, material tier, facade color. The headline figure is built from your measured geometry — the room-by-room panel shows each room's floor area, wall area, paint litres and paint cost, and the itemized list shows every line as quantity × rate with the math written out and a verification date on the rate. Anything marked 'estimate' is an admin-maintained figure with no published market rate — labelled, never hidden. The PDF report button prints the whole thing for your contractor conversation.
One habit worth keeping: cross-check one room. If the plan says your bedroom is 12 by 14 and the traced rectangle reads about 168 square feet, your scale is right and everything downstream inherits that accuracy. If it reads 300, your reference line was off — redraw it and confirm again. Thirty seconds of checking, and the whole estimate stands on solid ground.