Visualize Your Dream Room
Written by NancyLee Honey
Tired of your living- or family-room arrangement? Pushing that furniture around to a new spot could be dangerous to one’s health.
What to do? Well, there’s a way to rearrange your living spaces without lifting, shoving and dislocating your back: consider an online room planner.
This room design software is a super way to replace a boring room with an exciting one without landing in the ER.
It only takes a few moments until customers can see a lovely, realistic room, precisely to scale. Within minutes furniture can be perfectly placed or quickly rearranged, allowing a quick view of changes they were struggling to visualize.
What a magical, back-saving way to experience a new home or room, and with instant success. Often when selecting furniture, visualizing how it works in our home is a challenge. However, with good 2-D and 3-D online room planners, the stress melts away.
Entire homes can be planned with furniture easily moved about to see how it looks, feels and fits in another location. Focus on what’s most important in the room and home and then try different renditions.
A room planner does not require a lot of technical skill and within minutes can give you insight of any room in your home to help turn it into a magazine picture.
There are a variety of basic options to help you get started:
• Magic Plan: This app is great if you are sitting on the couch with your phone, dreaming up ideas. You can measure and sketch interior plans in 2-D and 3-D.
• Plan Your Room: This site (planyourroom.com) is a basic digitized kit, best used on a laptop or desktop. Options for a living room, bedroom, dining room and home office.
• FloorPlanner: A highly rated tool, FloorPlanner helps a user create an accurate drawing in 2-D. Click on 3D to see your plan from every angle. Floorplanner.com.
• Sweet Home 3D: Entry-level tool. Draw the plan of your house, arrange furniture, and visit the results in 3D. Sweethome3d.com.
Locally, businesses that offer online planners, including Coastal Home, use on-site planners to help out-of-state customers who are moving to the area.
“Our online room planner gives those who live in other states a way to look at room arrangements and how our furniture will fit into their homes here,” said Steve Steele, owner-operator of Coastal Home.
Steele said Coastal Home, which has served the Lowcountry since 1995, said his company added an on-site room planner during the COVID pandemic to help clients “visualize configuration of their furniture and if that sofa they love will fit where they want it.”
The best interior design software can ensure real-world dimensions and previews of the room without physically spending back-breaking hours re-locating pieces of furniture. Homes or rooms can quickly be redesigned, remodeled so family and friends can view changes and offer suggestions, if wanted.
These online tools are all about visualization and modifying rooms in real time.
Even with the available quick touch-of-a-finger technology, many people still prefer to see their rooms in beautiful designs created by a professional decorator/designer with whom they can sit and discuss their ideas.
With many hours of expertise helping clients from every area in the U.S., Donna Coudes, owner of Interiors by Donna Coudes, said she loves designing perfect homes with personal touches specifically for her clients.
“You know within 15 seconds of entering a room the character and preferences of the owners, so it’s significant to capture the essence of the family,” she said. “Discovering with them the ideal setting where they will enjoy their lives is always very rewarding. We linger and talk together to determine their favorite style, colors, most utilized rooms and number of people who will be living in their home.”
A personal touch can also be rewarding. What’s the best decision for you? Maybe both options.
Using an online planner or having a sit-down conversation with a designer/decorator can be complementary components to designing your home.
No matter how we get there, choices for modifying or rearranging home life will reflect hopes, dreams and happy times ahead.
