Design Your Dream House with Floorplanner: "
Floor plans are an important medium to visualize the house in scale for aspiring home owners. In the competitive real estate market, listings with floor plans draw significantly more interest. Like all design verticals, professional floor plans will cost you dearly.
Floorplanner gives us the tools to make our properties stand above the rest of the crowd. With Floorplanner, in addition to creating plans, we can export great images for printing brochures or code to embed the plan in our website or blog.
Overview
The idea behind Floorplanner is to be the easiest way to create and share building floor plans as awesome looking and interactive as possible. With its simple drag and drop tools Floorplanner makes it easy for just about anyone to come up with floor plans that are accurate and on scale in all places.
Overview
Floorplanner has my kinda sign up page – just three fields and no email activations. After signing we have the option to choose the premium plan of our choice.
Sign Up
Skipping this page will still ensure you access to the free personal account. Please note that you can create only one floor plan with this free account.
Pricing
While the pricing page at Floorplanner offers just subscriptions for both personal and professional use, they don’t mention the prices of the plans.
Pricing
The personal plan is free and you will have to pay if you want extra features like high quality image import, generate leads etc.
Now, once you sign up, you are shown a page to upgrade the account. Only here we get to see the pricing details.
Subscription Plans
If you are an individual home-owner you can pay an one time fee of $29 to get ads removed and to make upto 5 complete plans. Large real estate companies can opt for a monthly subscription of $29.
Dashboard
The dashboard of Floorplanner is minimal with a squeaky clean layout. There is not even an unwanted pixel in the screen. Good job UI design team.
Dashboard
On top of listing all the floor plan projects currently associated with the account, the dashboard also shows a feed from the official blog which intimates users about the new additions to the app like orange trees, daisies, beds, windows etc.in the respective categories.
Creating a floor plan
Now it’s time to swap the writer’s hat with a yellow hardhat. I slept through most of the civil engineering & engineering design classes in my UG and I know jack about building design to begin with. With that disclaimer, let us go design the ultimate geek bachelor pad ever designed.
So what is the most important part of a house that a geek cannot live without? Anyone, anyone?
A basement! I could not find a specific layer for basement and hence going to use the entire ground floor as one.
New floorplan
All you have to do is drag the mouse around the canvas to draw a structural layout or to add interior design elements.
Adding a Window
Let us just add a tiny window to the basement by choosing Doors & Windows from the drop down. Select the type of window you like and drag & drop it to wherever you want in the floor plan.
Adding a wall & comments
Walls and surfaces can also be created in a few mouse clicks. You can also add comments to any section of the floor plan for the reference of your collaborators.
Editing dimensions
Erasing & correcting on paper no more! I do remember the painful process of correcting my mangled engineering design sheets. Any layout dimension can be altered by clicking on it and entering the new measurements.
New Floors can be created in tabs by using the Settings icon on the top left corner.
Adding Interior Decorations
Floorplanner has a great collection of interior design elements in various categories that are common when building something. For example, if you select Bedroom from the drop down, we have a wide range of beds, pillows, night stands, dressers, and for those who have not come out yet, closets to add to the plan.
Fully furnished design
It is just amazing to see how detailed of a floor plan we can create with this amazing web app. A fabulous three dimensional view of the plan can be generated instantaneously by toggling to the 3D option.
3D View
Sharing the Plan
Sharing the Plan
From the dashboard, you can get the embed codes to share the plan on your website or you can email a copy of it directly to collaborators. The plan can also be allowed to be viewed by everyone publicly or just in a gallery. With a free plan, you cannot keep the plan completely private.
Final Thoughts
I found Floorplanner to be so easy to work with in all levels right from creating an account to creating floor plans. Despite the complex looking demo examples, I was able to create my very first floor plan in no time.
During evaluation, I did not notice any lags and the app did not hog system resources even with multiple layers in the design. Floorplanner has all the qualities to be a go to app for professional architects and aspiring house owners alike.
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