Design Your Own House With a Home Design Software

Interior design is a ballet of organization, function, and style. While this might sound like a lot of balance, we’re here to remind you that it’s a creative (and fun) challenge! Keeping all of these factors in check can be very difficult if you don’t have a foundation of knowledge to build on, but Spoak is here to help fast-track your creative process and bring your vision — and your own home — to life. 

How To Create Floor Plans

One of the challenges of creating your own floor plan is getting everything to scale properly and making all elements appear proportionate. With a few helpful tips, you’ll become a floor plan pro in time.

Measure Your Home

Interior designers, real estate agents, and homeowners have too much to do already. That’s why we made our interior design visualization tool — to make the design process as easy as possible. This is just one of Spoak’s design tools that can help you create an exact representation of your home in an intuitive, easy-to-learn way. 

For an existing house, follow these steps to get your floor plan perfect:

1. Do a walk-through and measure all your rooms with a measuring tape. Don’t forget to measure the height of your walls too. After this is done, the rest of the design process will be a cakewalk. (Well, maybe not working with building codes, but the rest of it for sure.)
2. Create a project in Spoak and use the floor plan tool to set the scale of your entire home (and not just one room). You can set the dimensions for every single room in your house and have it live under one house plan together.
3. Add basic elements like furniture that take up the most obvious spaces. We’ll save aspects like decor for later. Remember to get the basic measurements of furniture to keep the space to scale. 
4. This is the fun (and optional) part: mess around with assets like furniture and lamps to get a feel for what the suite of design tools can do. You can do this in real life, too, but doing it on your computer is a touch easier with Spoak. Check out our demo tutorials to get a deeper dive on how the tools work.

Envision Your Space 

Learning how to remove backgrounds from product images in programs like Photoshop can take a long time to master, but Spoak makes it easy with just a click (literally) of your mouse. Envision your space with almost anything by simply uploading a product image or personal image or importing a product from a URL, and our design tool will take care of the rest.

Viz takes away all of the tediousness and complications that would extend the amount of time it would take to put a chair in that one corner of the bedroom. Interior design is all about customization, so if you see a one-of-a-kind credenza and can’t find a promotional image to upload, simply snap a picture on your phone and upload it in a flash. 

If you’ve ever played the Sims, this suite of tools is right up your alley and can be learned even faster. All the perspectives and pictures you produce will be perfectly to-scale and will leave very little to the imagination — except, of course, the imagination needed to design a new home. 

Stay Organized

Building projects can easily descend into chaos with dozens of open tabs, notepads, and pictures spread around the table. Spoak fixes that problem. All your images and design ideas will be neatly stored in tabs and folders within your Project Hub for your convenience. 

Your Thingdex organizes it all for you and can be hidden if you’re working for clients. The space can be used as your personal vision board and scratch pad for all the ideas you want to play with. 

You can create sections that can be shared with your clients or friends, like a slideshow for products you want to add or a mood board. Not only is there a notes tab, but you can also add notes to any item in your sections to keep track of your thoughts and plans. 

This whole house design process will be a visual treat, even when slogging through the building permit process. (Don’t believe us? See for yourself by reading these user testimonials.)

Keep Track of the Budget

When it comes to building projects, space planning isn’t the only planning you’ll need to do. We’re talking about budget planning. It’s not as fun as setting up the cutest living room ever, but it’s all part of the custom home-building process (and every home makeover). 

Ever get overwhelmed with balance sheets and stacks of invoices and receipts? With Spoak, you can throw all of that stuff into a volcano. Track all of your spending with the budget tracker. You'll notice a Budget section on your overarching project homepage level in the bottom left-hand corner. Or, if you're in your Thingdex, look at the bottom left-hand corner under Sections, there is the Budget and Shop List. 

In this tab, organize and set a budget for the whole project. Near the top right of the interface, you can see where the total budget is and can edit it on the fly. After changing or updating the budget amount, you’ll be prompted to notify your client of the change.

Adding items to your shopping list is a breeze; go to your Thingdex and click on the shopping cart icon below the item you want to add. A window will pop up to confirm the cost of the item. The same window will also allow you to change the number of items you want in case you need more than one. 

View and change the status of items you’ve ordered to keep track of what you’ve bought and where they are in the shipping process. The Budget tab enables you to send over budgets for your client’s approval by clicking on the “Not Sent” drop-down and then tapping “Send.” You and your client will receive an email notification for the budget approval. 

Pick Color Palettes

Spoak design tools can conjure up a completely original color palette for you to play with, or you can give Spoak an image, and the software will create a color palette derived from that image. If you have a set of furniture that your clients ask you to use in the design, coming up with a theme is pretty much instantaneous. 

There are prefabricated color palettes that you can browse and get inspiration from. The individual colors are represented in bars that you can add and subtract from depending on what you need. The key to a good color palette is figuring out your core colors first and then picking accent colors later. 

Learn Skills on Your Design Journey

Part design app and part interior design school, Spoak is a place to build a foundation of design style knowledge and tools that you can take advantage of to save time for your clients and yourself. Basically, we put the plan in home plan. 

The future of design is less technical and more artistically accessible for the everyday person with an internet connection and measuring tape. 

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^Sources:

^{How to manage a balance-sheet in troubled times | The Economist}

^{What Is a Building Permit? | The Spruce}

^{How to Measure the Square Footage of a House | US News‍}