1. Plan & Draw Room Layout
1. Plan & Draw Room Layout
Budget Summary
Cost Breakdown
2. Cost Estimation & Materials
Flooring (planks/tiles)
| Material | Qty | Unit | Unit Price | Total |
|---|
How does this thing actually know how much paint to buy?
Most renovation calculators online are a form with three fields: width, length, height. That works fine until your room isn't a perfect rectangle — and most aren't. A nook under a window, a sloped ceiling in an attic conversion, an L-shaped living room: multiply two numbers together and you'll be off, sometimes by a lot. So instead of building another form, we built a planner where you draw the room the way it actually looks. Floor area, wall length, and paintable surface get calculated from that drawing automatically.
Doors and windows go directly onto the wall you've drawn, and the app subtracts them from the paintable area — skip that step and it's easy to overbuy paint by 10-15%, since nobody paints through a door frame. Flooring works the same way: pick a herringbone or diagonal layout and the waste margin bumps up to 12-15% automatically, because that pattern genuinely produces more offcuts. A straight layout only needs 5-10%.
What the cost table is actually doing
Once the room is drawn, the right-hand panel shows four tabs — flooring, walls, tiles, and labor. Each one works off the real coverage figures from the product you're buying: for paint you enter the coverage rate printed on the can (usually 10-14 m² per liter) and the number of coats; for tiles you enter the tile size and grout width so adhesive and grout quantities come out right. Unit prices in the table are editable, so comparing a budget finish against a premium one doesn't mean redrawing the room each time.
Are these numbers accurate to the cent? No, and we're not going to pretend they are. Material and labor prices swing by region, supplier, and time of year, and unusual room shapes are always worth double-checking with whoever's actually doing the work. Think of this as a solid starting point for that conversation, not a replacement for it.
Once you're done, the estimate exports to a print-ready PDF with room plans and a shopping list attached. The app runs offline as a PWA, and everything you draw stays in your browser — nothing gets sent to a server, so there's no account to create.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
No — that's the point of drawing it instead of typing in numbers. Sketch the walls roughly to scale on the grid, add your doors and windows, and the planner works out the floor area, wall area, and perimeter for you. You can always nudge corners and openings afterward if a measurement was off.
That's actually the main reason this tool exists. Alcoves, sloped attic walls, L-shaped layouts — draw them as they are and the area calculations follow the real shape, not an approximation. A plain width-times-length formula falls apart the moment a room has a nook or a missing corner.
Yes. Once the room is drawn and the unit prices in the table look right to you, the "Export to PDF" button generates a print-ready report with your floor plan and the full materials breakdown — handy for comparing quotes side by side.
It does, once you've loaded it once. Reno Costify is a PWA, so you can install it like an app and it keeps working offline using your browser's local storage — useful if you're sketching ideas at the store with patchy signal.