Why Won’t This Move?

Four numbers explain most of it

Six different tools can take over your left click. Three views share one selection. Undo is three changes deep, and a signed-in session lasts about eight hours. Those four numbers sit underneath most of the “the planner is broken” messages we get, and none of them are faults — they are decisions, each reversible with a click or a keystroke once you know which one you are looking at.

Two remedies come before any specifics, because between them they clear a good half of the list. Press Escape. Then click the tool button again — the buttons are toggles, and a toggle still held down is the commonest reason a click goes somewhere strange. If selection behaves afterwards, you have found it.

For everything else, the shortcut is the avatar on the edge of your canvas, present in both the 2D plan and the 3D view. Left-click Emma and a voice call opens; left-click again and it hangs up. A right-click opens a typing panel, which answers questions, needs no microphone and no account, and has no tools at all — reading your live state is one of her tools, so every sentence in this chapter is a voice sentence.

She is not looking at a picture of your screen. The planner hands her a short written statement of the situation instead:

• Which view you are in — plan, elevation or 3D, which by itself answers a good many “it is not there” questions
• The room — the walls you have drawn and the ceiling height of each, since height is set per wall rather than once for the room
• The selected item — catalogue code, size, the wall it sits on, and how far off the floor it is
• Overlap warnings — the same collisions the plan paints red, in words
• Your last few edits, and the last message the app showed you — usually the one you dismissed without reading, which is very often the whole explanation

The honest scope, then: she can tell you what state your planner is in and which of the possible causes matches. She cannot see a bug and will not pretend to — her answers are grounded in this written guide, and when the lookup comes back with nothing relevant she says she is not certain and points you at a human.

Voice needs a Google sign-in, microphone permission, a supporting browser and time on the clock: ten free minutes a day per account on the Toronto calendar day, then one GH Coin per five-minute block. Her opacity is the meter — faded means the microphone is off and nothing is being spent, solid with a ring means the line is live. If she never goes solid, that is a different chapter.

Say “Something odd is happening — read me what you can see.”

Clicking does the wrong thing: something else owns the mouse

This happens to almost everybody in the first ten minutes, and it reads as a total failure: the planner has stopped selecting. It has not. A tool is still switched on, and while it is on it owns the left click — every click goes to that tool rather than to the selection, which is precisely what you asked for when you turned it on.

Six tools behave this way, three that draw and three that paint, and the tell is always the same: look at what your click produced rather than at what it failed to do. The thing that appeared names the tool that is armed.

The countertop one catches the most people, because it sits in a tab you opened for another reason: you go in to look at a surface, click it to select it, and the face painter — on, because painting is what that tab is mostly for — paints it. Whichever painter is armed owns the click. One rule, not three.

If Escape clears it and normal selection comes back, stop debugging. You have your answer and nothing is wrong with your design.

Say “Every click is drawing something instead of selecting — what have I got switched on?”

It will not select — or it did, in the wrong window

You picked a cabinet in the elevation, moved the mouse to the top view, pressed an arrow key, and nothing moved. Nothing is broken: the selection belongs to the view that made it. The views are on screen together and share one selection, which is why it has to belong somewhere — the arrows follow whichever view you actually clicked in. Click the cabinet again in the view you intend to work in and they come back to life.

Three other reasons a click lands on nothing, in the order worth checking:

• A tool is armed — the previous section, and still the likeliest cause on this page. Escape first, always
• You clicked the cabinet when you wanted the wall — walls are selected on the wall band itself, never on something standing in front of it, and the wall is what the elevation and the ceiling-height card follow
• It is behind something — from your current angle in 3D a base cabinet can sit entirely behind a tall unit, and the click hits what is in front

For that last one there are two pointers that never miss. The ⚠ Errors button in the top-right of the canvas lists every overlapping cabinet, and clicking a row jumps to it and selects it for you. The other is Emma: every item carries a number, the same number the planner prints in its own item list on screen, so you can read it off your display and say it. Asking her to select a number highlights it and changes nothing else — a safe confirmation step before a command you are unsure about.

One item behaves differently on purpose. A corner cabinet is tied to the junction where two walls meet — that tie is what makes the two runs line up — so it selects normally but does not slide along a wall the way a straight cabinet does.

Say “Read me the list and tell me which one is selected right now.”

It moved — just not where you meant

Cabinets snap to their neighbours and to the ends of walls, and the reason is worth stating because it is the reason you should not want it off: a run assembled without it comes out with accidental gaps that are invisible on screen and expensive on site.

The cost is the moment you meet here — you drag a box somewhere specific and it lands somewhere else. Two causes, and they look identical.

• The spot is already takenSomething occupies the stretch of wall you are aiming at, and two boxes cannot claim the same run. The top view paints both of them red the moment it happens.FixOpen the ⚠ Errors button in the top-right of the canvas. Every overlap is listed, and clicking a row selects the offender so you can move it, narrow it or delete it. The red clears itself the moment the overlap is gone.Say“Have I got anything overlapping?”
• The snap is pulling it to the neighbourYou want a deliberate gap and the drag keeps closing it, because closing it is the snap’s entire job.FixStop dragging. Select it and use the arrow keys — each press moves it by the movement step, which you can change in the designer settings — or type the position into the selection panel, where a number is taken literally and is not overridden by the snap.Say“Move number six three inches left.”

That second fix generalises: when a snap is fighting you, type the number. Dragging is a negotiation with the snap; typing is not. It is also how you correct a room you drew roughly — click the wall band in the top view, type the real length into the wall card, and the cabinets already on that wall stay put relative to the wall rather than being thrown off it. Wall by wall, that is far safer than redrawing.

Two things that look like mangled numbers and are not. Left and right in a spoken move run along the item’s own wall rather than along your screen, which is why the answer does not change when you spin the 3D view round. And the inch / millimetre toggle changes every label at once and nothing underneath: everything is stored in inches, so switching back and forth alters only what is printed.

Say “Read me number six — what wall is it on, and what is next to it?”

It is not there, or it is drawing itself wrong

The other half of “nothing happened” is “nothing appeared”. These are views and modes rather than missing data: the thing you are hunting for exists, and is either drawn somewhere else or drawn correctly according to a setting you did not know you had set.

• The elevation shows the wrong wall, or nothing at allIt draws whichever wall is currently selected, so it follows your last click rather than your intention. Blank means either that wall has nothing on it yet, or it has been hidden.FixClick the wall you want in the top view — the wall band itself, not a cabinet standing in front of it. For a wall that should be there and is not, the wall list chooses which walls appear.Say“Which wall am I looking at, and is there anything on it?”
• The base cabinet has lost its toe kick and its legsLift a floor cabinet more than six inches off the floor and it stops being a floor cabinet: the kick and the legs stop drawing, because at that height it reads as a wall-hung box — which is exactly what a floating vanity is.FixLift it six inches or less and the kick comes back. If you want it high and still want a kick, drop it down and raise the toe-kick height instead.Say“How far off the floor is number four?”
• The 3D view is slow, choppy or feels stuckThere are four quality levels, and the planner normally picks one based on how your machine is coping — which means it can also change its mind mid-drag.FixSet the quality lower by hand and lock it there so it stops adjusting itself. Only the detail drawn while you move changes, never the design.Say“The 3D view is crawling — what should I turn down?”
• You went looking for a bulk head and found the wrong oneTwo objects carry that name: the soffit that fills the gap to the ceiling above a run of wall cabinets, and a free-standing shaped bulkhead you draw in the top view.FixDecide which you mean first — the controls are in different places.Say“A dropped ceiling over the island — which of the two is that?”
• You cannot shift the plan around, or it slid when you did not ask it toMoving the view is not a left-drag — dragging empty space sweeps a selection box, which is why the plan appears nailed down. Three gestures move it: two fingers on a laptop trackpad, a middle-button drag with a wheel mouse, or the space bar held down while you drag. A pinch or the wheel zooms. Whichever you use, nothing in the kitchen has moved — you are sliding the window, not the design, and the item numbers stay exactly where they were.FixHold the space bar and drag: that one pans on any machine, mouse or not. If a plain scroll behaves like the wrong device — the wheel sliding the plan, or the trackpad zooming when you wanted to slide — the plan-view settings carry a Pan & Zoom Input switch with Auto, Mouse and Trackpad.Say“I am on a laptop with no mouse — how do I move the plan?”

Two more that are modes rather than bugs. Editing in 3D requires the planner’s Edit 3D mode — ask Emma to move something there and her tools switch it on themselves rather than refusing, and she mentions it once, so nothing moves behind a silent change of mode. And if you cannot see inside a cabinet, the doors are shut: press O and every door and drawer swings open, press it again to close them.

Say “Which view am I in, and what is selected?”

Sign-in, saving, and the three-step undo

The stakes change here. Everything above wastes a few minutes; the things below can lose an afternoon.

Start with what needs no account, because it is most of the planner: drawing walls, placing cabinets, the 2D, 3D and elevation views, the countertop drawing and the running quote all work signed out. Nothing pesters you until you try to keep something. Sign-in — Google only, free, no password to invent — is for saving, loading, publishing, exporting, the automatic design and the AI extras. Which sets up the three ways work goes missing, all preventable.

• The session ran outA signed-in session lasts about eight hours. After that the planner signs you out and the next Save asks you to sign in again; a greyed-out Export is the same thing wearing a different hat.FixYour work on screen is not lost — sign back in and save. On a long session, save before you walk away rather than after.Say“Save this as Plan B.” Signed out, she says so plainly — which makes the save command its own sign-in test.
• You saved while signed outA design saved signed out lives only in that browser. It is not gone, but it is in no account and it will not follow you to another computer.FixSign in and save again. That copy goes to your account and travels with you.Say“What have I got saved?”
• You undid one step too many, or one too fewUndo walks back the last three changes and no further — deliberately, since the planner keeps three snapshots so a large scene does not eat your browser’s memory. Older edits cannot be undone by any means.FixTreat three as the real number it is. Before anything drastic — clearing the room, a fresh automatic design, pulling four cabinets out to see how the run reads — save first.Say“Undo that.” It takes back the last change whoever made it, mouse included.

Say “Save this as Plan B, then tell me what I have saved.”

It said no: what each refusal actually means

A refusal is not an error. Every message below is the planner telling you the truth about something it cannot do — which is what you want, since the alternative is software that quietly does something adjacent and lets you find it three days later in a quote.

The first two rows come from the same place, and it is not the language model. Asking what to do next runs the planner’s own deterministic step logic over your layout, and it returns exactly one of three things: a recommendation naming one cabinet, which wall and where, with the reason; a question it needs answered first; or a statement that it is blocked and why. It works corner-first, never recommends the same corner twice, and treats everything you have placed as locked. Its honest limit: it steps you through the floor cabinets, the base and tall run — wall cabinets are the automatic design’s job, or yours. How it decides is a chapter of its own.

Two more refusals rather than faults: a corner cabinet changes size only within its own family — a 33″ easy-reach for a 36″ one — since changing family alters how the two walls meet, which comes from a fresh automatic design. And crown moulding is stocked in a short colour list, so the planner uses the closest stocked colour rather than inventing one.

Say “Read me the last message the app showed me — I clicked it away.”

When to stop debugging

There is a point where carrying on costs more than asking, and it arrives sooner than most people let it. Our rule of thumb is three checks and about two minutes: press Escape, work out which view owns the selection, have the last message read back to you. If the behaviour still matches nothing on this page, stop.

Before anything else, though — save. With undo three changes deep, poking at a confusing afternoon with no named copy to come back to is how it becomes a lost one.

Then pick the right door, because four different things get called “the planner is broken”:

• The software is confusing youClicks landing wrong, things not selecting, something not drawing where you expect. This page — then the full tour of the designer if you want the whole map rather than the symptom.
• The assistant will not start, or drops outShe stays faded, the microphone never goes live, the call ends after a quiet stretch. The troubleshooting chapter covers all of it, including why five quiet minutes close the connection on purpose and how she comes back.
• You want to know what she can and cannot changeEvery command, every refusal, and why there is no swap. The command reference.
• Real cabinets are misbehavingDoors out of line, a drawer that catches, a gap at the wall. Nothing on this page applies. Chapter: fixing what went wrong — screws rather than software.

If it is a genuine bug rather than a setting, the “Need a human?” link inside the planner puts it in front of somebody at Flip Cabinetry. Tell them what you clicked and what happened instead — those two sentences beat a paragraph of description, because they are what someone can reproduce.

One last honest note. Voice calls are not recorded: the audio goes from your browser straight to the speech provider, never reaches us, and no transcript is kept. If you want a record of a conversation, type it — typed conversations are kept. The privacy page states it plainly.

Say “I have tried everything on the list and it still does it — what would you check?”