Using Home Designer

Obviously, you have to have the Home Designer software design tool. I have used 3D Home Architect, and it wasn't bad, but HD 6.0 is much better. The two programs work differently, with some kinds of functions being easier in one program than in the other, but overall ...

Assuming you have HD 6.0 (either Suite or Pro, I am using the Pro* version), first launch the program. I assume you have gone through the user's guide and the training videos (if you have them), and you have tried putting a design together. You were probably frustrated by the difficulty, especially the challenge of making your design actually look somewhat like you envisioned. If you weren't frustrated or felt overwhelmed, then you probably won't read these pages. Then again, I know a few tricks and techniques you might find useful.

OK, so we'll say you are staring at a clean white, blank window. The next step for us is to choose a default "style". Go to the File menu, and select New.

When you click on "New", you will see the following dialog box:

Let's select "American Casual" for our starting style. We could select any of the styles, and you probably should experiment with each one to see what differences there are between them. The only style I personally don't find useful is the Today's Traditional style, which I think is much too dark (too much dark wood for me). My favorites are Urban Chic/Contemporary and Arts & Crafts. American Casual starts us off with some useful default values for walls, doors, and cabinets. We will change some of the defaults, especially for the floors, but for now, click OK and let's proceed.

We're back to the blank screen, and the wall tool should be selected (if not, click on the red brick wall icon on the toolbar). I added an arrow, above, to show where it is. If your toolbars are in different locations, then your icon won't be where I've shown it. (Gee, you think?) My screen resolution is 1280 x 1024, which is just about adequate. You won't be very happy with 1024 x 768 (or smaller), so if you can set your screen resolution to something higher, I recommend you do it. There now, feel better?

It has always seemed very counter intuitive to me to begin a house design by simply drawing some walls, and then moving them around until they are where we really want them. I always think there should be some planning done before we start making walls, but after having done quite a few designs, I believe it ultimately doesn't matter, that much. The room box wizard seems like it should be way cool, and it does do some nice things for us, but if we already know the general layout of the rooms in our house, we are almost as well off by simply drawing (and moving) walls until we have them where we want them.

So, that's what we're going to do. Let's move on to Drawing Walls.

* The Home Designer Suite version sells for around $100, which is within the budgets of most of us. The Pro version sells for around $500, and is definitely not for the casual individual who merely wants to visualize their house design. The Suite version does not do custom roofs (among other things), but for this design that isn't a problem. We will use the "automatic roof" function to put a roof on our house.

** It seems the MX700 isn't necessarily available by itself, these days. You might be able to find it at Overstock.com, but when I checked it was almost out of stock. As far as Logitech is concerned, it has largely been replaced by the MX1000 laser optical mouse. I have one of those, as well, but it does not zoom in and out the way that all earlier Logitech mice do. For that reason, I don't recommend the MX1000.