Cómo planificar una reforma con solo tu iPhone

The hardest part of starting a renovation isn't the work, it's the unknowns. How many square metres of tile? How much paint? What's a reasonable bid for repainting two rooms? With a measuring app on your iPhone, you can answer all three before you make a single phone call.

This is the workflow we'd use ourselves to scope a small-to-mid renovation, a bathroom retile, a one-bedroom paint job, a kitchen floor replacement, from "I want to do this" to a ballparked budget, in one evening.

Step 1: Capture every room you'll touch

Open Ruler AR (or any AR floor-plan app) and scan each affected room. Don't skip rooms you think are obvious, the laundry room you walk past every day is probably 0.5 m² bigger than you think.

• On a Pro iPhone, use the LiDAR room scan: walk the perimeter, the app builds a 3D model with walls, doors, windows, and furniture identified.
• Without LiDAR, use the manual room builder: stand in a corner, walk along each wall, tap the corners.
• Either way, save each room as a project. Name them clearly: "Bathroom, main", "Kitchen, floor only", "Bedroom 1, paint".

Each project gets a PDF with floor plan + wall dimensions + total floor area. Keep these, they're the input for everything that follows.

Step 2: Calculate the material quantities

Open one of your saved projects. Tap into the material calculator. The app already knows the room's dimensions, so it can produce material estimates in seconds:

• Paint. Wall area minus door + window cutouts, divided by typical coverage (usually 10 m² per litre for one coat). The app assumes two coats by default; adjust if your paint is one-coat or three-coat.
• Floor (tile / laminate / vinyl). Floor area + 10% waste factor for cuts. Bigger waste factor on diagonal lays (15%) and herringbone patterns (20%).
• Baseboard / skirting. Wall perimeter minus door widths.
• Wallpaper. Wall area divided by roll size (typically 5 m² per roll), rounded up. Add 10% for pattern matching.
• Wall tile. Tiled wall area minus tile-cutouts for fixtures. Adjust based on tile size, large-format tiles have less waste than mosaic.

Export each estimate as part of the PDF. Now you have material quantities you can plug into a price-checking phase.

Step 3: Price out materials

Take your quantities to your favourite hardware retailer's app or website. Search for products that match your specs (matt-finish wall paint, 60×60 cm porcelain tile, etc.) and multiply quantity × unit price for each line item.

Tip: shop two or three retailers before committing. Prices on identical products often vary 30%+ between IKEA, Home Depot/Lowe's, Leroy Merlin, B&Q, OBI, or local distributors.

Save the cart total per retailer. This is your materials baseline.

Step 4: Estimate labour

Labour is harder to estimate from a phone because rates depend on your region, the job type, and the contractor's overhead. But you can ballpark:

• Paint a room. 0.5-1.5 days per room for one painter, depending on prep needed.
• Tile a bathroom floor (4-6 m²). 1-2 days for one tiler, including waterproofing prep.
• Lay laminate or vinyl click flooring. ~10 m²/day per worker.
• Replace baseboard. 4 hours per room if walls are square.

Multiply by the local labour day rate (search "[your city] painter day rate", most regional contractor associations publish this). Add 15% for management overhead, taxes, and miscellaneous.

Step 5: Build the spreadsheet

On your phone, open Numbers or Excel. Make a row for every line item with columns: Quantity, Unit, Unit price, Total. Sum the totals into three buckets: Materials, Labour, Contingency (15-20% of materials + labour).

That total is your self-assessed budget. When you start getting bids, you'll know within 10 minutes whether a bid is in the right zone or wildly out.

Step 6: Use the PDF to brief contractors

Send the per-room PDFs (with floor plan + dimensions + material estimate) to every contractor you're getting bids from. This does two things:

• Sets a professional tone, contractors expect haggling and ambiguity from homeowners. A measured PDF says "I've done my homework, please quote accordingly".
• Eliminates the "let me come out and measure" delay. The contractor can send a quote the next day instead of next week.

What you can't do from a phone

Some things still require a contractor visit:

• Hidden plumbing / electrical. If the renovation touches walls with utilities behind them, only a contractor with a camera and wire tracer can tell you what's there.
• Structural changes. Removing a wall, adding a window, changing load-bearing structure, needs an engineer or architect.
• Permits. Anything beyond cosmetic work in most jurisdictions needs municipal sign-off. Phone-measured drawings are a good starting point but not a substitute.

The point

You don't need to know what you're doing to get a good renovation outcome. You just need to know enough to ask the right questions. A measured floor plan + a material estimate + a labour ballpark turns "what will this cost?" from a mystery into a conversation. Your phone is enough to do all three.