One of the hardest things we found with designing the extension is visualising how it will look and getting feel for the size of rooms. So we have used a number of ways to get a better grasp on the layout.

Scaled drawings

Most people have done this at some stage. Draw out each of the rooms to scale. Then draw out all the furniture to the same scale, cut them out and start moving things around to get an idea of what can fit where. Though this is very useful it still hard to visualise the room and how much walk space there is between items.

Planner 5D

Planner 5D is an app you can use to plan out your house and then create realistic renderings of what it will look like. Best of all you can create a 3D virtual reality version you can use ‘walk around in’ using a VR headset.

We did this by getting the Windows version which we found a lot easier to draw the room layouts. You can then open your layout on your mobile phone.

To view the designs in VR we got our Hamswan headset from Amazon:

Room Styler

Room Styler is a free online room planner that lets you view you rooms in 3D. It’s got a wide range of furniture (including real life examples) and produces really nicely rendered images, though sometimes doors are mising on the 3D images.

Lego models

We’ve created a couple of Lego models to scale of both our previous house and the our new house’s extension. We’ve found this really useful to both get a feel of the size of room, but also to compare room sizes between the houses.

Previous house

Extension

Marking out the design on the floor

We found that our current hall is a similar size to the new kitchen. So we moved some furniture around in the hall to replicate the kitchen island (using a table) and the units (using tables and a desk). We quickly discovered that the island was taking up too much room in the centre of the kitchen and was difficult to walk around.