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Today’s market is oversaturated with sophisticated software for home design that enables homeowners to try themselves in remodeling of their homes. So with the help of computer program they can put everything they want to any place at their discretion and see how it will look. And what is more, they can do so many projects as they like and choose the best one, which suits their taste. Thus they can place windows, doors, walls, partitions, furniture wherever they want and even see how shadows will fall at different times of the day.
 

People like to spend a lot of time on home remodeling, maintenance and repair with the help of design-it-yourself software. And despite the cooling of housing boom homeowners still spend enough money on their homes; they put money especially into kitchen and bathroom. Maintenance expenditures grew up to $215 billion in 2005 from $199 billion in 2004, according to the Census Bureau.
 

All this impelled companies to produce and put on the market new lines of home-design software. The latest programs possess realistic graphics, automatic processes for complex steps like adding cabinets, and thousands of materials, textures and even landscaping plants to choose from, versus cumbersome and crude computer-assisted design programs of the early 1990s.
 

Among the most sophisticated home-design programs I’d like to mark out the 495$ program produced by one of the two dominating at the home-design-software market software companies Chief Architect Inc. This program includes more than 1,500 sample plans and thousands of doors, windows, lighting and other furnishings that users can put into virtual rooms. There is also a scaled-down $149 version of the mentioned program and a $19.95 program called Picture Painter that allow users upload photos of a house to see how they look with different paint colors and materials.
 

Another big software company, Punch Software LLC, rolled out the program which contains more than 2,000 paint choices, hundreds of furniture options and even lets you to design a swimming-pool. And what is the most amazing to me that this program also allows the project-maker to see the way sunlight enters the home at various times of the day.
 

In accordance with NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y.-based research firm, interest in home-design software went up in 2005. So Americans’ expenses on home-design software increased 1.2% to $24 million in 2005 since, NPD says.
As for me, I would better apply to assistance of a good specialist (designer of architect) in order to work out a layout of my dwelling. I assure that all the sophisticated home-design programs which overfilled the market don’t give all the necessary information and knowledge on designing houses and inexperienced homeowners without impotent skills and accomplishments on construction and designing can make very serious mistakes which correction will require much money and time. Thus while saving money in architects’ and designers’ fees initially they run the risk of loosing much more afterwards. For instance most of the existing programs don’t take into account rules of state building codes. Or some less expensive software don’t enable to create the house’s frame, adjust wall thickness or customize rooflines.
 

There are so many examples when the absence of such essential construction elements as key beam or pipes in a toilet was discovered in home-made projects. Other projects placed the bathroom too far from the main plumbing lines, and the building and installment of such bathroom created additional difficulties and required extra expenses. That is, while dreaming up their design-projects homeowners don’t connect them to plumbing or central air system, and don’t take into account support walls. All this is explained by the luck of skills and knowledge. As says Ben White, vice president of a design and construction firm in Evanston, Ill. Benvenuti & Stein Inc., “Homeowners can draw to their heart’s content, but that doesn’t mean it’s legal or it’s buildable.” And I completely agree with him.
 

Thus the majority of those who appealed to the home-design software after spending a lot of time on working up their own projects were compelled to refuse them because of their discrepancy to the legislation or construction norms and standards, or because of their unfeasibility.
 

So I consider home-design software as auxiliary instrument for well-prepared specialists (designers and architects), which facilitate their work and allow them to save time and also to make visual demonstration for their clients. But such do-it-yourself products don’t fit for the use of ordinary homeowners. I am fully confident that only people with construction and designing education can model design-projects with the help of these programs. For others, in my opinion, it would be better just to tell their preferences to a good specialist and to rely fully upon his skills.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Miscellanea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.