Let Your Fingers Do The Building

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Fortunately, the software programmers anticipated this potential problem and have included handy cost and material estimators in their packages. Nothing like a harsh dose of reality to bring your wild ideas crashing back down to Earth. Both Planix Home Designer and CompleteHome provide excellent cost-estimating tools that keep an accurate inventory of materials and construction costs. These estimating tools calculate figures for both the house and deck designs. There is also the option of changing unit prices on any object, as well as adding one's own items to the list.

Of course, these programs cannot anticipate every single nut and bolt you will use to build your house, but they are a good way of generating at least a ballpark figure of the kind of overall expenses you can expect to incur.

A VIRTUAL WALK

Well, the house is finally finished, so what does it look like? Probably one of the best tools included in these home-design products is the 3-D viewer—and everybody's got one. These 3-D viewers allow you, the user, to take a virtual stroll through your finished design and get a pretty good idea of how things are going to look. Of course, the better the rendering option, the more realistic your 3-D view will be. Once again, of the three products, Sierra took top honors in this category. CompleteHome's 3D view was unique in that it was shown side by side with the 2-D drawing. As you add walls and furniture to the 2-D drawing, those same walls and pieces of furniture will automatically appear in the 3-D view. Then, with a simple click on the directional compass arrows below the image, you can tour your photo-realistic 3-D room layout.

All of the products give you the option of changing viewing angles, lighting conditions, and amounts of information shown on the screen, in order to better control the speed and clarity of the finished walk-through.

EXTRA CREDIT

Of course, every product likes to include something a little bit different to separate it from the other guy. For example, some extra goodies you will find in Sierra's package include an extensive online Home Improvement Encyclopedia, a do-it-yourself book called Home Repair Essentials, and a magazine filled with hundreds of existing home designs. Bob Vila's Home Design adds a bonus CD to its package that is full of helpful video tips on all aspects of home design and is narrated by Bob Vila himself. The CD also contains over a thousand different professional home plans that you can use to get ideas or even modify for your own use. And finally, Planix Home Designer includes a landscape design tool that allows you to scan in a photo of your house and experiment with adding a plethora of different trees and plants to your yard, making for more dramatic surroundings.

Best of all, you can get any one of these design packages for a price of under $60.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print