An Invaluable Tool For Home Design

If you're undertaking a home improvement project, however small, here's a program that you'll find invaluable. And when I say "however small" I mean it, as, being free, you can use Sweet Home 3D for something as simple as checking how a new piece of furniture will fit or, like us, something as complex as knocking out walls and redesigning entire floors of a property.

You start by putting in the walls and drawing a flat plan of the property like this and then continue to add furniture, flooring, ceilings, lighting and pretty much anything you need. We used it constantly during our project and it was fantastic when it came to deciding on where to position sanitary ware in the bathrooms and again when buying new dining furniture and looking at various options for kitchen layouts. I reckon it saved us making several mistakes as we had our hearts set on a couple of bits of furniture that we realised would not have fitted once we had input the details.

Once you've done your layout you can use the camera tools to look around the property in 3D and from every angle be it at normal head height or a bird's eye view.

Here's how Sweet Home 3D suggested the lounge would look.

You can then convert that view into a photo (or even a walk through video).

And here's how the lounge actually turned out - a pretty accurate prediction I think you'll agree.

The same applied to planning the kitchen/diner.

If I had a wide angled lens for my camera you could see just how accurate its predictions were.

There are so many more features to this fabulous program. Including a choice of lenses when taking snapshots of the designs. 

I really can't recommend this highly enough. It's been a fantastic tool in designing our project. Obviously there are professional versions but for us the free version was more than adequate.  You can download it at http://www.sweethome3D.com You won't be disappointed.

I Missed My Vocation

We exchanged contracts today and will officially own the house in Framlingham next Thursday. We've got to get all our ideas together for the architect so I downloaded a brilliant free program to help us to get our project designed. It's called Sweet Home 3D and it allows you to draw the layout of the house and then add all the features you want. Once you've done that you can add furniture and fixtures and then view it from every angle in 3D. You can even create a video run through of the property. I've only created walls and played around with a few bits of furniture so far but it's starting to take shape. It's not only fun to do it's also extremely useful as we've already changed the size and position of openings in walls, moved a wall 700mm back and moved radiators around. Without the program we would definitely have an inferior set of instructions for the builders. If I was starting out on a career again I would love to be working on something like this.

After a flying visit to Suffolk on Monday we're now on a flying visit to St Andrews. I know I'm getting on a bit now and I do have the odd accident with food but I'm not sure that Sarah was justified in putting this table mat in my place at the table when we popped round for lunch today.

And on the subject of food, here's a bit of haute cuisine from our wonderful motorway system. I won't name the service station as the woman who served us this dog's breakfast did so with charm but £5.99? If she'd had the benefit of Sweet Home 3D I'm sure that it would have been obvious that that hash brown should have been presented just below the sausage and the bacon shifted up a little - not that any of that would have resurrected the fried egg that must have been fried some time last week.  

Sarah is so busy getting ready for her Boden home shopping party on Tuesday that I was allowed to take Rose out on my own. We had a trip to the supermarket - what a joy! Who needs round the world cruises when you can spend an hour with a grandchild?

She's fast approaching her first birthday and is starting to find her feet. She's not walking yet but it surely won't be very long.

And here's an invitation to that Boden party. There's 20% off, free home delivery (and return) and, of course, a chance to try the clothes - something that you don't get buying online. If you are in St Andrews on Tuesday and want a super new outfit come along, check out the wide range on show and share a few refreshments.