Renovating, remodeling and remaking your home are now made easy with handy apps that give you ideas, help you visualise how a piece of furniture will look in your home
Renovating, remodeling and remaking your home are now made easy with handy apps that give you ideas, help you visualise how a piece of furniture will look in your home, provide you colour options, and even make sure your paintings are hung straight

Renovating and redecorating a home can be a major project. It takes time, money and commitment because once a room is painted, a piece of furniture bought, a wall knocked down, there is often no going back. Thankfully, we live in a world where the virtual can be called upon to help us make real-life decisions.

Apps are one of the easiest, most convenient ways of tapping on this type of technology. Insidesingles out some must-have apps for your next design project.

App-ly inspired to give you décor ideas

1. Houzz

What’s the app for: Home décor ideas

Used on: iPhone, iPad, Android devices

Price: Free

Houzz is a collection of over 12,000 professional pictures of rooms, homes and home décor items that you can browse through for design ideas. You can save your favourite pictures in a virtual ideabook or share them. Features on all things related to home makeovers will clue you in on how to manage your remodeling project.

Need an architect, interior designer or contractor? Houzz will help you source for one. You can even ask for advice from the Houzz community.

Share your favorite images with family, friends and design professionals, or save them to a private virtual ideabook.

Space-planners to help you visualise your layout

2. SnapShop

What’s the app for: Helps visualise how a piece of furniture or home décor item will look in a space

Used on: iPhone, iPad

Price: Free

If you have ever had trouble picturing how an item in a shop or showroom will look like in your home, SnapShop is what you need. Simply upload a picture of your room and the app lets you virtually overlay products from a catalogue onto that image. You can then move the pieces around effortlessly to find the right spot for your new furniture. Forget imagining. Now, you can see for yourself how it all fits before you buy the piece.

3. Autodesk Homestyler

What’s the app for: Helps visualise in 3D how a piece of furniture or home décor item will look in a space

Used on: iPhone, iPad, Android devices

Price: Free

This is another app that takes the guesswork out of redecorating your home, albeit a more sophisticated and complex one. Autodesk Homestyler lets you layout floor plans, put in products and then see the outcome in 3D. The interactive 360 panorama function allows you to view the room from different angles. Choose from a selection of more than 40,000 products, colours, finishes and size combinations. You can live out your makeover aspirations virtually till you find the right fit.

Virtual painters so you’ll always get your walls coloured right

4. PaintingWalls Lite

What’s the app for: Helps visualise how an entire room will look in a certain colour

Used on: iPhone, iPad

Price: Free

Colours from catalogues or patches of swatch often look very different when transferred to a larger space. With this app, you won’t have to wonder if the colour you pick will work in reality. Take a picture of the area you want to paint, pick the colour you want from the app and add it to the picture. You can key in information such as the edges and angles of the wall for a more accurate simulation. You can even add your own selection of colours for greater variety.

Handy helpers to see to home improvement details

5. iHandy Level

What’s the app for: Makes sure photos and paintings are hung straight

Used on: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android devices

Price: Free

This app works like a spirit level, an instrument designed to tell you if a surface is level. It measures angles and inclines so you will never have a crookedly hung picture or painting again.

6. Sun Seeker 3D Augmented Reality Viewer

What’s the app for: Helps to see what you can get the best natural light

Used on: iPhone and iPad

Price: S$8.98

Using the iPhone’s GPS system, this app can tell you what direction you are facing, where the sun will rise and set in a room and its path and angle at any time of the day in the space. Point the phone at a window to use the app. You can view the image flat or in 3D.

This is really handy when buying a new home, deciding how best to arrange your furniture to get the best natural light, or designing your garden.

7. Photo Measures

What’s the app for: Helps to see what you can get the best natural light

Used on: iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch

Price: S$8.98

This app helps you keep the dimensions of your home handy. Snap a shot of your space then add in the dimensions. The picture, complete with measurements, is now ready for your next meeting with your designer or contractor, or the next time you go furniture-hunting.

With these handy apps at hand helping you redesign the way you design your home, you will never have another decorating faux pas ever again.