Sweet Home 3D Plan Your House 4+

I’m remodling a house and love several things about this program. It’s much easier to work in the metric system, so I do all dimensions in metric, but in the USA lumber and some other things are still sized in inches. This program allows you to quickly change back and forth. Very handy to avoid mistakes. Also works as a converter. What I don’t like is I’d like to be able to draw my own furniture, windows, etc. that aren’t in the library. Pretty much all I can use this software for is the walls, which is very helpful, but I have to use similar objects sized to my sizes. Sure would be nice to be able to draw simething with lines and curves then convert it to an object. Overall, excellent value for the money. Being able to turn layers off is very handy because you can include all sorts of mostly irrelevant dimensions that you need to build but can make vanish for the larger overview. The 3D and rotation is useless to me, I only use plan view, but I’m sure some folks use it.

When looking for a new place we want to quickly understand how the layout will work with our stuff and how it feels to get inside the space. In this situation I want something fast which still has a lot of options for how to move and place things. SH3D hits that sweet spot for me. You wouldn't use this for professional interior design, but it's very useful for the price...

I've done a complete condo renovation and a round of (successful) house hunting on room plans in SH3D. For the renovation, it helped to communicate the ideas to the designer intuitively, and then they went to town with actual measurements and CAD. It also made us understand what would fit in each room in a new or existing space. For house hunting, you need to know if a layout actually works before you move. With this I can get a floor plan and start drawing walls, copy-paste my furniture, add some basic details and in 20 minutes I know whether the place works or not. And from there can add details and go nuts if you want.

Anyway, I can't give it 5 stars because the UI feels a little dated, and some of the models are a bit cartoonish, but you really can get a useful house plan in a short amount of time. And that is worth it for me.

My wife and were looking for an app in order to be able to precisely create a new design for our condo (creating and moving walls etc…) and also being to decorate it to get a really good idea of what would work. We had the blueprint and simple scanned that as the background, and then easily drew the exisitng walls over that. Once we knew the measurements were on target we could easily add and move walls, as well as furniture and fixtures to get a really nice looking AND accurate 3D rendering of what we could do. We completely came up with a new floorplan and design in a weekend! The learning curve is small, so once you spend a little time working you’ll get the hang of all the tools. To me, this was huge, as I didn’t to have to learn some complex new app. Also, what I love about this app is that it is totally accurate to measurements (and proved measurements). So, for example, it won’t let you place a wall or piece of furniture that’s too large in too small an area. So, your renderings are our-to-life and accurate. Can’t think of much else amateur home designers would want/need! Love this app!