interior design

Buying a house is really exciting, and one of the first impulses of any new home owner is to start planning the renovations and buying furniture. But one of the frustrations is that it takes about 3 months to complete the transaction, so while you are all fired up and enthusiastic, you don't really have access to your new place yet and it's difficult to really make decisions on the interior design. And by the time you get the keys you are too busy with the wedding preparations. Of course some things you can do are to obtain the floor plan, measure the dimensions of all the rooms and take a lot of pictures.

Then there is another way introduced to me by Jed, and that is Google Sketchup. Google Sketchup is a free software with a very easy-to-use interface for 3D modelling. So you can practically draw out your entire home from the ground up, and add in furniture, colours and textures. You can also grab some stuff from Sketchup's 3D Warehouse. So after about an hour or two of tinkering, I was able to produce a pretty good model which I proudly sent to Jed one night. I even popped in a few pieces of furniture for good measure.

The reply I got the next morning was, "I cleaned it up for you". (Notice the addition of windows, door frames, and protrusions in the walls, all nicely superimposed onto the actual floor plan.)

And he spent much less time than I did, too! Oh well I guess that is why he is an architect and I am not. Now I just need to add in the colours, textures and furniture. Of course all this happened a couple of weeks ago, and I'm still trying to find the time to sit down and work on it some more. First, I should also watch the instructional videos which are supposed to tell me everything I need to know. And when it's ready I can have a virtual housewarming before I even get the keys.