Interior design is one of those peculiar things you either have an eye for, or you don’t. While reading ‘Ideal Home’ magazine religiously will improve your ability slightly, you’ll always be fighting an uphill battle without that innate eye for what’s right, and what’s not.
Thankfully, we live in a time when you don’t need to be an interior design whizz to get your home looking on point and up to date. The internet has provided us with some useful, and more importantly, free tools that complete design novices can use to create a functional and aesthetically pleasing space.
So what interior design tools can you use to get your home shipshape and looking great for 2017? Let’s have a look…
Find the right Floor
Choosing the right colour and material for your floor is something even experienced interior designers can struggle with, so don’t feel too inadequate if you need a little help. Aside from the aesthetics, your flooring should meet your budget and provide the durability, functionality, warmth and comfort you’re looking for.
To give you a helping hand, a flooring company called Quick-Step have created a website, called ‘Find Your Dream Floor’, which allows you to upload a picture of your room and try out a vast array of different flooring types to see what works best. You can select everything from the colour and the grooves of the flooring, to the wood species (if you decide to go for a wooden floor) and performance. Although the flooring options are all supplied by Quick Step, you can see which flooring type looks the part and go and find the best price elsewhere.
Put everything in the right Place
When it comes to the layout of the room itself, there are a number of apps out there that allow you to upload the dimensions of the room and set the exact floor plan before designing the space from scratch.
Planner 5D is probably the best of the bunch as we enter 2017. This app allows you to do everything from picking the furniture from integrated, constantly updated catalogues, to playing around with the colour scheme, materials and plenty of other design accessories. Once you’ve finished designing your space, you can view it in 2D and 3D and print out your design to take to your local design store.
The finishing Touch
Okay, so now you have designed the fundamentals of your space, it’s time to consider those all-important finishing touches. This is an area where a lack of interior design experience can really show. If colour matching is your Achilles heel, the furniture firm Oka have created a ‘pillow picker’, which allows you to try out different cushion combinations on a digital sofa. You can then select from a wide range of colours and materials until you get it right.
What interior design tools do you use to create the perfect space? Please share your tips with our readers in the comments section below.