Building your own home is a thrilling process, from start to finish. However, it can be challenging too. Working with a homebuilder to create a custom home involves making a thousand decisions—some small and others extremely significant. Luckily, modern technology can help make these choices a bit easier.
As you build a custom home, you’ll need to decide on a floorplan, an exterior design, custom layout options, paint colors, appliances, flooring, cabinetry, and everything in between. Of course, builders like Adair Homes have professionals on hand to help you every step of the way. But new, intuitive mobile apps can also be invaluable for envisioning your future home, tying the design and decor together, selecting paint colors and finishes, and more.
Here we’ll count down six apps that you should download when building your own home:
1. Adobe Color Capture
As your custom home starts to come together, you’ll have to decide on paint for each room. Although this can seem overwhelming at first, it can be helpful to begin noticing what types of colors you already enjoy around you. Color Capture allows you to gain color inspiration for your home from your day-to-day life. If you spot a piece of art that has beautiful hues or see a nature scene with colors that would be perfect for your bedroom, just take a quick photo using the app. Adobe’s software will create a customizable color scheme, as well as 3-D patterns, that can help you easily plan for each room’s palette and vibe.
2. Houzz
Houzz is like a Wikipedia for home design and decor, with millions of images organized by style, room, and location. You can use the app to get design inspiration and shop directly for furniture and decor. Plus, their new sketch function lets you make notes and draw directly on images and then save them to your Ideabook for later reference.
3. Havenly
Havenly is perfect for new homeowners who need a bit of one-on-one help with interior design but don’t necessarily want to hire a designer. With Havenly, you upload an image or two of the room or space you’re looking to style and then collaborate with a professional designer to make design decisions. They have pricing for any budget, so you can rely on Havenly for full design projects, finishing touches, and anything in between.
4. Photo Measures
This app is like an all-in-one reference for sizing your home’s furniture and art and referencing its interior dimensions. Simply snap a photo of a room or a piece of furniture, and then use the app to note the measurements directly on the photo. Then, when you’re out shopping for furniture or decor, you’ll know exactly how it will fit in the space—and whether it will fit through your front door.
5. roOomy
Once your new home is complete, decorating all those empty rooms can feel stressful. But roOomy can help to make furniture and decor decisions easy by converting photos into 3-D renderings. So, for example, you can snap some photos of your new living room, use Roomy to create a 3-D image, and then try different furnishings and art in the space. Being able to visualize your decor before you buy can save you lots of time, money, and headaches.
6. Sun Seeker
This clever app shows you the sun’s path and rise and set times for your home’s location. It will also provide a map view of the sun’s direction for each time of day, which can be helpful when you’re determining how to orient your new home, whether to enlarge windows, where to build a porch, and more. Once you’re on to the decorating phase, Sun Seeker can also help you determine which areas of your home will receive the most and least sun, which lets you make the most of interior plants, paint colors, and decor.
Ready to start designing your dream home? Check out our customizable floorplans to find the one that would work best for you.
