(This is a new post from Juliet Gray! Tell us what you think.)
This thing is a fantastic little web app.
If you are dreaming of a home remodel, moving to a new home and need to figure out which furniture to keep, want to freshen up your living space without buying a single thing look no further than Home & Garden TV's Room Planner.
The Room Planner let's you go through your home defining each room's dimensions, adding a window here, moving a door there and experimenting with different layouts. Our only complaint is that you can't save your work on their website. But, when you go to "print" your room, you can save the image of your floor plan to your computer.
i prefer the one on www.bhg.com because it saves the room you're working on.
I just started using Google's Sketchup (click my name for download). Let's me make 3d models of my house, lots of furniture available. Very easy to use (for a 3d modeling application, anyway). And it enables me to envision what I'm going to do before I do it.
Here's a re-design of my place to remove an unwanted wall between the kitchen and living room:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=b3d6b273ad45dd659492a43db329f086
How about a model of a dining table I designed (no idea if it will work, but it was fun to do).
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=25695002a51a61c38596fa5b590d746a
I'm currently working on a re-design of my front porch, which is hideous at the moment.
Doodle, lucky you,
I had no such luck with Sketchup. I have a simple one bedroom and I could not get the program to work with me. I haven't been able to do what I want with any of them. I have numerous pencil sketches of the layout with actual measurements. I want a program where I can type in those demensions and create a scaled down version of the rooms. Is there anything out there like that, that isn't over $100?
Doodle,
This looks cool. It will replace my many off scale postits and scavenged (from the engineers in my dept) graph paper sketches of various rooms in my house.
I tried the Ikea kitchen planner, but it doesn't work for me because I don't have a box-shaped kitchen. For that matter, niether is my living room.
Unfortunately this HGTV room planner does not work on Apple computers. Anyone know if Google's Sketch up does before I try to download it?
Argh! How can it not run on Mac!
Don't they realise that many people that have beautiful homes use beautiful computers too!?!?
How disappointing.
Also check out the visualizer on HGTV.com. It's pretty cool and you can save your work.
http://onlinedesigner.hgtv.com/visualizer
The Google download site has a version for Mac OS X (10.3.9)
Lisa from VA,
I can't say that it was easy in the sense that I was able to create any of those things 2 minutes after I installed the program. It took some experimenting. But I did find the included tutorials very helpful, after which I spent some time playing around and wondering about the possibilities. There are lots more tutorials on the website.
As far as entering dimensions, I found that in the lower right corner is a box into which you can type the dimensions of whatever you're drawing; Click to start drawing a box, then let go of the mouse and type in the dimensions. You can even mix fractions and decimals (5.5 x 1 1/8), and even do math (5.5+4 3/8 x 2).
I will say that I'm lucky enough to be one of those people who prefers to learn to use software by fiddling around with them until they make sense, rather than reading manuals...maybe that also means that I don't mind a certain amount of complexity as long as the software does something useful. But I can see where other non-computery people would hate that sort of thing.
The great benefit of the web-based planners like IKEA's and HGTV's is that they are very easy to use immediately. They just aren't very flexible.