Designing your home is a lot of work.
You ride this emotional roller coaster all the time where there are equal parts excitement and nervousness at the same time. More so, once invested, it is incredibly hard to improve the existing conditions.
You cannot get around without a significant amount of investment of resources: time and money. But you can get this right in one shot. With proper planning and the right set of tools, the self-sustainable home of your dreams is just a few steps away.
So the big question here is how to ensure you have the right set of tools at your disposal?
The answer lies closer than you think.
The best tools and applications are the ones that make your home designing journey simple, efficient and fast throughout the different stages. In this post, we reveal to you all the top industry-leading tools that you can utilize at every stage of designing your home in 2021. Keep reading for the exciting part.
5 tools to create a self-sustainable home in 2021
There is no shortage of tools and applications for designing your home in the market. You would get more options than you would probably require, both freemium and premium.
If you feel a little overwhelmed with the app market’s abundance, then fret not, you are not the only one. In fact, it is natural to feel so.
However, you can easily destress yourself from this condition. All you have to do is validate the capability of the tools in terms of user-friendliness, cost, and efficiency. This will effectively help you gauge out the value-for-money you get from your choice of tools.
Or there is a smarter way.
You can skip all the hard work of surfing the internet, trying and testing the tools, and start your project right away with the tools we hand-curated for you.
The following tools are some of the most popular applications in their categories and are sure to bring maximum efficiency and support to your project.
1. Project Planner
There are multifarious aspects of planning a home. From designing to managing vendors, budgeting, and managing timelines, all work simultaneously. This makes a planner incredibly powerful in managing and comparing your vendor options, material costs, timelines, and designs.
The best part is you can create a complete project and delve into details like room color, materials used, sample screenshots to illustrate, the dimensions, and more. In short, your complete design work can get detailed in this one app.
Following are our top recommendations.
a) Evernote
When it comes to brainstorming or note-taking activity, Evernote is unbeatable. The app lets you utilize powerful features like tags, voice notes, bullets, tables, checklists, pre-defined templates, and more. You can even integrate the app with some of your favorite tools and share your plans with collaborators and vendors. The best part is you can start using them all for free.
b) OneNote
If you are a Microsoft fan, consider using OneNote. You can take notes and share them with your team at any time. You can also tag people, calendars, or notes using this tool. The best part is you can sync it with your Desktop app and access it from anywhere on the go.
2. Home design software
Home design software is perhaps the most critical tool for your entire project. This ensures you can create a complete wireframe to a fully functional mockup for a virtual tour of a finished home. It is the home design software that makes visualizing your design ideas fast and easy. You can get started in minutes. But how do you know which tool is the best for you?
The best-performing tool supports developing blueprints, 2D layouts to more finished 3D looks, everything.
Here are our top picks.
a) Foyr
Your home designing task is a breeze with Foyr. Powered by AI (artificial intelligence), this tool can do it all. Right from ideation, designing to rendering, this powerful designing software supports all.
What’s more, it is super intuitive, which makes the learning curve almost nil. You can build a complete project within minutes with the tool supporting both the 2D and 3D design of your home design. You can even start a project all from scratch or upload an existing one. Once the blueprint is uploaded, you can add finer details to it. Elements like windows, doors, and connecting passages are a few of the elements you can experiment with.
However, the true USP of the tool lies within its drag-and-drop feature. You can use this powerful feature for creating different light settings and furnishings for your rooms in real-time from its expansive library of pre-modeled miniature furnishings. The end product is a 4K definition, photo-realistic rendering of your home.
b) SketchUp
This is another tool that can do this job. This is a good tool to start with your 3D modeling experience. It is a tool that works well for both beginners as well as professionals. This tool has a very simple learning curve and doesn’t take much time to master.
3. Color testing app
Colors play a vital role in designing your home. Done right, it can be the game changer in your home design. Setting the right mood for your overall designs, your colors can create much-needed comfort in your home. The problem is finding the right shades and tones for your home is difficult. Sometimes colors that appear to be pleasing on sample cards do not go well on walls. This makes color testing so incredibly critical.
Fortunately, you can now perform this activity using simple color testing apps. More so, there is no money investment for sample colors or time hurdles. It is all hassle-free. Following are the color testing best apps you can consider for your home.
a) Color Picker
Color pickers have a unique ability to assist you in choosing colors. Where most color testing apps help you to try on different colors virtually on your designs, this app works the other way round. You can easily upload a picture on the app and get suggestions on the closest colors that the picture has. Chroma is a strong contender for you to consider.
4. Virtual lookbooks
Research and mood boards are an integral part of home design. Creating a mockup version of your final design enables you to visualize your end product. You can easily make changes to this soft version to refine the design until satisfied.
The best part is you can achieve all of this without wasting a lot of monetary resources and energy. What’s more, you can ensure you have all the current market trends of home design at your fingertips to choose from. Here are our top methods and tools to do so.
a) Pinterest
Pinterest is the champion of lookbooks. Having a clear visualization of your end product is necessary to create a cohesive design. Many times you might even synthesize a fusion design of two or more styles. But ensure that your fusion doesn’t end up in confusion, lookbooks are critical.
This tool makes sure you have all your ideas, from basics to finer details, all clustered up in one place. Pinning all your ideas into one board helps you navigate through the design process. All you need to do now is stage your design into rendering software.
5. Project management
If there is one application that can make or break all the hard work that you put up in building your home, it is the project management tool. It doesn’t matter how beautiful or creative your home design is, you are to collaborate with vendors to finish your home fast. This is where the maximum trouble occurs. Without proper collaboration and management of timelines, planning your complete home design project can turn upside down.
Your vendors can get miscommunicated, there can be lags in the timelines, and much more. But with a project management tool at bay, you can ensure all these problems never happen. Here are the top tools to consider.
a) Ivy
When it comes to managing your complete home design project, Ivy sure has made a name for itself. Taking out all the redundant administrative tasks, this tool lets you do what you subscribed for: bring out the best creative yet sustainable home design you dreamed of. In order to do so, it goes beyond just features, integration capabilities, and automation.
This unique platform allows you to access expansive and valuable industry resources and a highly responsive design community to keep your creativity flowing. The best part is to use all these resources, you do not need to undergo a steep learning curve. Infact, using this tool is dirt simple.
b) Trello
If you need something agile and are not looking for robust features, Trello is an excellent option to consider. This is a tool that encourages visual collaboration at its best and enables you to share your perspective with your team on any project in a fun way.
Conclusion
The above tools in their respective categories are all potent tools that you can use to bring maximum creativity and speed to your vision to build a sustainable home. But, here’s a word of caution.
There is simply no tool to create a marvel. They can only support you in realizing your vision. This means the best tools are not only indicated by objective metrics like performance, user-interaction simplicity, and speed. Subjective metrics like budget, style, and requirements play an indispensable part in determining it.
If you think a trial version of software satisfies your goal, then go for it. However, if you think paying a premium brings maximum value in the long run, it is always advisable to go for it. But, the final decision is still yours. Now, when you understand how and what tools can help you build your dream home, it is action time.
Which tools from above are you integrating into your home building toolkit?
Author bio: Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as an Instructional Designer and is passionate about writing. She has helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted content that is both informative and engaging. She lives in Bangalore, India with her husband and parents. She loves to read, experiment with different cuisines, travel, and explore the latest content marketing and L&D trends in her free time. You can reach her on Linkedin or write to her at [email protected] to discuss your content marketing requirements.
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