Drawing Your Floor Plan in Range Up Without Measuring Anything

Nobody has a tape measure when they finally get annoyed enough to fix their Wi-Fi. The good news is that you do not need one. A coverage simulation cares about what stands between the router and the room that fails, and roughly how far apart they are — not whether your living room is 14 feet or 15.

Here is how to get a plan onto the grid with your feet, which details actually move the answer, and the sketching habits that quietly ruin a map.

The grid is a meter, and that is the only unit you need#

One cell on the Range Up canvas is about a meter — call it three feet and three inches. A blank plan runs from 12 to 60 cells wide and 10 to 50 cells tall. A typical two-bedroom apartment fits comfortably in about 13 by 9 cells; a four-bedroom house usually wants something like 18 by 13.

Two sizing habits are worth forming right away.

Do not draw small. The placement search evaluates open tiles as candidates, so a house squeezed into one corner of a big grid gets a coarser picture of every wall. Size the grid so your outline fills most of it, with a cell or two of margin.

Size the grid to your largest floor. All floors share one footprint, so the ground floor of a house with a smaller upper story sets the dimensions. The rest of the multi-floor rules are in drawing a home with more than one story.

Pace it, do not measure it#

Your stride is a measuring instrument you always have. A relaxed adult walking step covers roughly 2.5 feet, which gives you a rule that is easy to hold in your head while walking through a house:

Four normal steps is about three cells, which is about ten feet.

For short runs — a bathroom, a hallway width, an alcove — switch to heel-to-toe steps. One is about the length of your shoe, near enough a foot, so ten make about three cells.

Calibrate once and the rest of the house follows. Pace your longest straight run, then check the count against something whose size you already know.

Proportions beat precision, by a wide margin#

Across open floor, signal drops about 6 dB every time the distance doubles — the walls are accounted for separately, on top of that. So getting a 15-foot room three feet wrong — a 20% error, worse than any pacing you will actually do — costs a decibel or so in the result.

Now compare that with the obstacles. An ordinary interior partition costs 3 to 8 dB at 5 GHz — a bare drywall stud wall at the low end, one packed with wiring and plumbing at the high end. Brick or cinder block runs 10 to 16 dB. Reinforced concrete is 15 to 25 dB. A mirrored closet door or foil-backed insulation can top 20 dB on its own. One wall you forgot to draw outweighs every dimension in the plan put together.

That gives you a clear order of effort:

1. Which walls sit on the straight line from the router to the room that fails, and what they are made of.
2. Where the doorways are — a door costs a small fraction of the wall around it, so an opening is a signal highway.
3. Relative proportions — a room twice as deep as the one next to it should be drawn twice as deep.
4. Absolute dimensions — nice to have, and worth about a decibel.
5. Everything else — worth nothing.

The one precision that genuinely matters is consistency. A plan drawn 15% small throughout is fine: every distance is wrong by the same ratio, and the wall count is still right. A plan where the living room is to scale and the bedrooms are squashed to fit is not, because the geometry now lies in one direction only.

Draw it in this order#

Working outside-in keeps the proportions honest and saves you re-drawing.

1. Outline the exterior as a closed loop with the Wall tool, starting from one corner and pacing each side. Close the loop before anything else — every later wall gets positioned relative to it.
2. Sanity-check the box. Count the cells across it and against your paced numbers. Fix it now; moving an exterior wall later means moving everything inside it.
3. Add interior walls, longest first, working from the same corner you started at. Long walls anchor short ones, and errors do not accumulate the way they do if you draw room by room.
4. Punch in the doors. Replace the wall tile with a Door tile at every opening — including cased openings and archways with no door in them, which behave far more like doors than walls.
5. Add the heavy structures you would otherwise forget: the masonry chimney, the tiled shower wall, the mirrored closet door, the bank of kitchen appliances. Draw each as a wall tile where it really stands.
6. Erase and tidy anything you overshot, then stop. The plan is done when the walls between the router and your problem room are right.

What to draw, and what to leave out#

The simulation reads three tile types and nothing else, so most of what you see in a room is invisible to it.

Every wall tile costs the same figure, so set that figure for the walls on the path and treat the rest of the map as approximate.

The one detail worth adding late is the material setting behind those tiles — telling Range Up about your walls covers identifying your own construction, and how walls affect Wi-Fi has the full loss table.

Five sketching mistakes that skew the map#

Each of these produces a plan that looks right and predicts wrong.

Rooms drawn as sealed boxes. By far the most common. You outline four bedrooms, never place a Door tile, and now every path in the house has to punch through solid wall. The map turns pessimistic, the target room looks dead, and the app recommends a position for a problem you do not have. Every real opening needs a door tile.

Double-drawn shared walls. Draw the living room as its own rectangle, then the kitchen as its own rectangle beside it, and the wall they share becomes two wall tiles thick. The line from router to kitchen now pays that material twice — 6 to 16 dB instead of 3 to 8. Draw shared walls once.

Copying a listing floor plan. Listing plans are stretched to fill the page and routinely lose the proportion between wings. Use one for the room arrangement, then pace the two or three distances on your problem path.

Leaving everything on the default material in a masonry home. A generic partition preset in a brick, block or lath-and-plaster house is optimistic by a wide margin, and optimistic in the one direction that makes you buy the wrong hardware.

Adding detail before the outline is right. People draw closets and bathrooms into a box whose exterior is two cells off, then have to redo all of it. Get the shell right, check it, then go inward.

When the sketch is good enough#

Stop when three things are true: the exterior outline matches the shape you would walk, every real opening between the router and your problem room is a door tile, and the wall-loss setting matches what those walls are really made of. That is a plan worth trusting, and it usually takes under five minutes.

Then check it the fast way. Place the router where it really sits and look at the heatmap: if a room you know to be fine reads red, or a room you know is dead reads green, the drawing is telling you where it is wrong. What the heatmap colors are telling you covers what each band means, and the rest of the flow — router, target, placement search, results — is in the full Range Up walkthrough. If drawing from scratch still feels like work, start from a starter layout and correct it instead. You can get Range Up here, and the placement rules your sketch feeds into are gathered in the extender siting guide.