Product review – Room Sketcher

How many times have you watched HGTV and wished you had the money and the resources to redesign your home? How about the interior designer inside you just begging to come out? Maybe you thought it was impossible to create and share your vision because you weren't able to draw or it was slowing you down when you had too much to do. It's not impossible, though. These days, you don't have to draw to be able to decorate—not when you have awesome software to generate your ideas! However, architectural software such as CADD and Chief Architect is expensive and complicated to use; you'd probably need to take a class in it to figure it out. Thankfully, there are free solutions. One of those free solutions is Room Sketcher.

Room Sketcher is awesome. It's easy to use and it comes with so many options—plus it's fun! You can create your own designs; choose everything from where windows are located (and what kind they are) to furniture and accessories. You can create additions to the basic floor plan by adding walls – and you can move and delete all items too. Add in windows, doors, furniture, and flooring, then position it to make it your own. Everything you can think to add to a home is available on Room Sketcher.

When picking out decorations, you can choose from many categories of items, which you can roll over for a bigger view, the dimensions, and the artist/manufacturer. One of the things I love most about Room Sketcher is that it uses real world products from stores like Ikea and Crate and Barrel, so you can actually go out and buy the items you designed with. It allows anyone to be a designer—without having to take all the messy drawing classes and remember all the details, so you can get to the fun part instantly.

Another thing I love is that you can use a camera and fix the settings to get the snapshot you want, which will appear in the upper right hand corner. If that's too small for you, you can get a bigger view of the snapshot by clicking on Gallery and checking out the Current Snapshot. You can also use something called Home 360, which gives you a 360 degree view of your current snapshot, as though you were actually in the room. There's another feature called Image Gallery which gives you snapshots from every room that you can save and print. You also have the option of using different floor plans (a level image, 3D floor plan (with 3D rendered items), and a 2D floor plan that just shows the architectural features) if you want to upgrade your account.

To access all the features, you will have to sign up but I say it's worth it! It lets you save everything in one place, so you won't have to fumble with everything on your hard drive trying to find where you saved your files (though backing up on a hard drive is always recommended).

All in all, Room Sketcher is one of the easiest design programs I've used. It's also much faster than drawing elevations and perspectives from scratch using a board and a straight edge. So if you want to create your own designs or if you are a designer and want an additional tool, then check them out at www.roomsketcher.com.

About FlexiRuggz

FlexiRuggz are awesome customizable rugs that you can design yourself! Pick out the color, fabric, and pattern of your squares – then have fun mixing and matching. And it's completely machine washable too!

Check us out at www.flexiruggz.com. It's hip to use squares!