Better Homes and Gardens Interior Designer [OLD VERSION]

Interior Designer is loaded with tools for decorating, remodeling, interior design, kitchens & baths, space planning and more. You can quickly place and arrange walls, windows, doors, cabinets, choose colors, place furniture, create kitchens and baths. The exclusive Design Planning Center offers expert "how-to" Design Advice. Change colors and textures for walls, floors, countertops, and more with Material Painter. Point-and-click to choose from thousands of colors and textures or create your own with Color Chooser. Design and visualize your home with 3D Models and Virtual Tours.

Overview of features:

• Inspire your designs with the Better Homes and Gardens Design Planning Center
• Create a Virtual Walk-Through of your home design
• Design and visualize in 3D
• Choose from a Library of more than 3,000 items for your designs
• Generate an Automatic Material List for project cost estimating
• Includes over 30 How-To training videos

Review Product

I bought this and the Punch interiors software. This software is easy to use compared to Punch, but I suspect thats partly because H&G is very limited in options. For instance in Punch you can design your doors exactly as they are. In H&G you choose a style and have a few options. Punch also has a large library of trees, shrubs and plants to use to landscape your design. H&G only has potted plants. With H&G there are few backgrounds to use, and most look like they were taken from the west coast; mountains, sand dunes and million dollar homes on the beach. 


Nothing for the average person living in a suburb. Punch allows you to import your own digital photos as background, or just use their sky background. Either works well. I imported several panoramic photos of my backyard and side, and you can then put them at any angle to completely surround your design. BUT, you better read the manual (342 pages), it's not an intuitve program, H&G is. With H&G you can basically start after just a little homework. H&G; easier to use with less options. Punch; harder to learn but more flexibility.

Price:

$58.99

Total 3D Home & Landscape Design Suite Version 9 [Old Version]

Experience home and landscape design software designed specifically for homeowners. Whether you are decorating a room, landscaping your garden, or designing your dream home, you'll have all the tools you need. Total 3D Home and Landscape Design Suite Version 9 comes equipped with Home and Landscape Design, Kitchen and Bath Remodel, Landscape and Decks, and Interior Design. It's the easiest way to design the home and landscape of your dreams!Features:

• Fully integrated, single-interface design--design your home and yard at the same time without switching programs or interfaces.
• Quick FloorPlan designer--simply drag and drop to create complete floor plans.
• Design center with color board.
• Real-Photo Dynamic Imaging.
• Drag-n-drop SmartBlocks.

    Product Description

TOTAL 3D™ Home & Landscape is designed for you, the homeowner, rather than an architect or contractor. Whether you are designing your dream home, remodeling a kitchen or bathroom, or creating the ideal outdoor living space, you’ll have all the tools and inspiration you need.

Review Product

I wish I would have read reviews of this product before purchasing it. I bought it from Target for $30. I knew it was not going to be top of the line software, but all I really wanted to was build a model of my home, import pictures of my furniture (which it says you can do), and try out different paint and decorating schemes. Unfortunately, this program is incapable of doing even the simplest tasks.

I have tried to create a model of my home multiple times. The problem is, once I encounter an error in the program and it shuts down (this happens pretty much every time I go from Space or Design Plan view to Walk Through view) my files are corrupted. I have done hours of work getting the measurements of rooms just right, but once the program has crashed, I am no longer able to open my file. I thought perhaps I was asking too much of the program, so I scaled back the house to one floor, then to one room. I finally tried to use one of their sample room plans. As soon as I went to Walk Through view and tried to change paint or fabric colors, the program crashed.

I do not have a wimpy computer. I have an Intel Pentium D 950 (3.4GHz), 2GB of system memory and 256MB of video memory on my NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX. I can run Adobe Premiere and 3DS Max without encountering problems. I just can't seem to get this software to work.

The only positive thing I have to say is that I enjoyed messing around in the Idea Gallery. There are 20+ pictures of rooms that you can redecorate by selecting a wall, comforter, or window covering and try out different colors and patterns. Unfortunately, even though it told me I was successful in importing my photos and custom textures, I was never able to apply or even view them in the program.

Overall, I'd have say that this software sucks. I strongly advise anyone considering purchasing it to look at other home design programs. 

Price:

$15.99

Interior Design Suite [Old Version]

Punch! Interior Design Suite takes the best of all Punch! Software features, adds powerful new technologies, includes top home improvement manufacturer product libraries and combines them all into one easy-to-use interface.
Punch! Interior Design Suite allows you to renew or redo your entire home from kitchen and bath design to basement remodeling, you have the power at your fingertips.
What you can do:

• Design your own storage with the Cabinet Wizard
• Layout your rooms easily with the Room Wizard
• Make moldings and baseboards with the Trim Designer
• Frame your outdoor view with the Window Designer
• Build a hearth for your home with the Fireplace Wizard
• Try new treatments with Decorator Theme Palettes
• Get help when you need it with the Help Tutorials
• Take a view through your roof by designing skylights
• Make your furniture fit with object resizing

Review Product

This proved to be a very powerful program, but heed the warnings about how difficult it is to use. I use parts of MS office that no one has seen before and have a background in computer programming, and this suite still drove me very close to tears.

I used this just for an apartment floor plan to think through moving walls around, not for complete house construction or modeling.

Here are some tips that might make things smoother for you:

- For some reason, the default flooring thickness is 12", so my doors were getting lopped off at knee-level. Once I reset all the flooring thickness to 1", I could see the bottoms of my doors again.

- If you have a wide screen and it's set to 120 DPI, the display chops of some of the customization controls on the right side of the screen.

- The distinction between exterior and interior walls matters, and is often at the root of flooring and ceiling problems. (E.g., grass in the living room or tiled front lawn.) The wall types sometimes morph into each other by rules I never figured out. If I had to do this again, I'd do all the exterior walls first, lock them against changes, and then add interior ones.
- My performance with the undirected fly-through is exactly what you'd expect from watching me play speedracer. Better way: Click on the binoculars on the left and you get cursor you can position for a "controlled walkthrough." You can look around using the 3-d display, but no more accidentally falling through the floor.

Price:

$29.49

Chief Architect Home Designer Suite 9.0 [OLD VERSION] [Download]

Home Designer Suite 9.0 is the latest release from Chief Architect, the professional software design company and the software of choice by more builders, architects and designers. Home Designer Suite leverages the same professional quality from Chief Architect making it the most powerful and easy to use home design, remodeling and landscaping software.

An advanced yet easy to use set of tools for Home Design, Remodeling, Interior Design, Kitchens, Baths, Decks, Landscaping and Cost Estimation. Click to enlarge.

Glass House View provides a full translucent view of your design.Click to enlarge.

Create plot and perimeter plans; automatically generate a 3D model of your actual terrain. Click to enlarge.

Doll House View, a 3D overview without the roof, is an effective tool for space planning of furniture placement and traffic flow. Click to enlarge.

Powerful deck and patio tools allow you to design and visualize your new deck with 3D models and can help you estimate the costs.Click to enlarge.

Choose from over 1,500 plants with the Plant Chooser. Click to enlarge.

Design or Remodel Your Home Today!
Chief Architect Home Designer Suite provides a fun and an advanced yet easy to use set of tools for Home Design, Remodeling, Interior Design, Kitchens, Baths, Decks, Landscaping and Cost Estimation.
Powerful, Fun and Easy Home Design Software

• Perfect for Home Design, Remodeling and Landscaping
• Choose from over 1,500 Sample Plans
• Choose from built-in home style templates, create your own custom home design or use the House Wizard
• Powerful building tools like automatic roof generation, dormers, stairs, framing and foundations
• Visualize your new Kitchen or Bath

Review Product

I'm new to architectural software. I was looking for something to visaulize a remodel of a house we're about to buy, to see how our furniture would fit, and to viualize artwork on the walls. The house I modeled is a square-ish structure with a daylight basement, dorma, two slab-based additions (screened-in porch and sun room), and a detached garage.

I initially tried [...] and paid them $75 to build the basic floorplan for me; however, once I tried to use it, it was a disater. I couldn't even figure out how to move from floor to floor in blueprint mode and the online help wasn't very good. Moreover the plans they supplied were wrong: they showed french doors instead of regular windows in the sun room. I e-mailed them about this and got no reply. ($100 wasted)

I then did some more research and downloaded a trial of Home Design Suite 9.0. I very quickly had my floorplan laid out and by the end of the day had most of our furniture installed, artwork containing my photography on the walls, and movies on the plasma tv's with scenes from my favorite movies.

The only negative thing is that I spent a couple of hours on the trial and got a lot of the floorplan completed, but couldn't enter the key I'd just purchased and save my work (the trial version cannot save, print, import, export, etc.). So I basically had to do it all over again.

The online help is great and there are a ton of online tutorial videos. I found answers to all my questions except 1 (adding driveways, sidewalks and roads) using the available online resources.

I plan to use it to remodel the kitchen, plan furniture layouts and to draw electrical plans for permits when we finally move.

There is a large tree in the yard of the house we are buying and I tried to find it in the plant library, but none of the trees in there were anything like it. Unfortunately, I know little about trees so I've no idea what species it is, but none of the pictures were anything close.

I highly recommend it. For under $100, it's a great deal. 

Price: $99.99

Chief Architect Home Designer 9.0 [OLD VERSION] [Download]

Home Designer 9.0 is the latest release from Chief Architect, the professional software design company and the software of choice by more builders, architects and designers. Home Designer leverages the same professional quality from Chief Architect making it the most powerful and easy to use home design, remodeling and landscaping software. Design your dream home today!


Fun & Easy Home Design Software
Chief Architect Home Designer is Chief Architect's entry level title that can help you with the basics to design, remodel or add landscaping to your home. With over 4,000 items you can create your perfect design. There are 500 sample plans all of which allow you to create a virtual walk-through of your home. The program enables you to easily visualize your project in 3D.



Home Design Software

• Floor and space planning--use to size and visualize rooms for remodeling or redecorating
• Quickly place and arrange walls, windows, doors, furniture, create decks and landscaping
• Easy to use automated building tools for roofs, stairs, framing, cabinets and more
• Generate various styles of Automatic roofs for your home
• Automatically generate a complete spreadsheet for your project costs, broken down by category. Calculate the amount of lumber for your deck or concrete required for your new patio.
• Use House Wizard to choose your rooms and then drag them to your design layout configuration to generate a floor plan
• Choose from over 500 sample floor plans to help generate ideas

REVIEW PRODUCT

We spent a casual week or so shopping for DIY home design software; I wanted to finalize a home design I'd been doing on napkins and in my head for years. Studied all their websites and compared/contrasted. Finally pulled the trigger on the $99 Punch software at Best Buy. Long story short; after a week of frustration, I took it back for a refund (BB doesn't like to do that on opened software, so I called and got a mngr's approval.)

What were the problems with the Punch? In no particular order:

1) The OOBE (out-of-box-experience) was not very good. It installed and ran OK; and the initial start-up scheme they have developed to get the rank novice going (that of dragging boxes (rooms) into rough locations) went OK; but the process began to bog down quickly due to my inexperience with the program. That's to be expected, but viewing the tutorials and then digging deep into the manual were often more frustrating than illuminating. Hey Punch: suggest you hire someone with ISD (Instructional System Design) experience to solve this problem.

2) No support for adding a fireplace? YGTBKM! Maybe it's in there, but I searched and searched, and the word "fireplace" was not to be found in the index, nor the reference manual, nor the search function.

3) No ICF support. This is becoming far too popular a modern green home construction technique to ignore.

4) I found the program to be far too finicky in such simple functions as "snap-to-point" when building a wall; I was wasting a lot of time trying to get it to do the simplest things. This is where Punch drops the ball the most; they don't appear to have designed the tutorials and training to overcome the most common errors of a typical beginner. (I have a Master's Degree in Educational Technology, so feel qualified to judge).

I then bought the Chief Architect 9.0 from Amazon for $53. At least for me, I'm having an easier time of it. (I'll grant you that the struggles with the first product made me somewhat more skillful with the second).

Not everything is perfect with CA 9.0 however. Expect some learning curve and frustration.

1) Very disappointed that the Punch had a 300+ page printed manual, while the CA 9.0 has only a .pdf.

2) I liked the fly-around camera function much better in the Punch than the CA 9.0; it's simpler and more intuitive. Quite often with the CA 9.0, with just a gentle flick of the mouse I get crazy gopher's-eye-view of my house from underneath, or sometimes a termite's-eye-view from inside the wall. Sheesh.

For $53..... thumb's up! 




Price:$59.99