Interior design is a must for your home. Having a home with a nicely decorated interior can make you very proud and happy because it greatly improves the look and appearance of your home. However, decorating a home is no easy task. To start this challenging project, you need to work hard. If you want to get best results in your interior design, you have to take your time and choose the best furniture that will be fitting for your home. If you do not have enough space in your home, then do not worry because there are many innovative solutions for this situation available today. Thanks to technology, we can now enjoy many useful online room design tools online without paying too much money or looking far away from our house. This article is very

What is room design software?

Before we start breaking down the best of the free room design software apps, let’s first go over how these type of tools work in the first place.

Most virtual room planning software tools function by allowing you to create a dimensionally-accurate digital layout of your space which you can then use to test out different ideas, such as how you should arrange your furniture or what direction you should go in with décor. You can also play around with details like flooring, paint colors, and lighting.

Think of room design software as a DIY interior design tool for optimizing individual rooms or even your entire house. The best free room design software apps are super simple to use once you get the hang of them, and because there’s no cost to you, they’re definitely worth trying out first before investing in a more costly measure.

Quality counts when it comes to room planning. With that in mind, here are our picks for the top free room design software options, with a variety of tools that can help you make the most of your space (without costing an arm and a leg).

Free Floor Plan Software

These tools are great to practice your design and styling skills, you can’t make a mistake here.  You can really try out all your ideas before you commit to them in real life.

1. SketchUp

SketchUp is an extremely popular 3d room planner, and one that I use a lot too. It is used a lot for interior design. There is a free and paid for version.  Whilst this isn’t the simplest piece of software to use, there are lots of tutorials to help you get started, but I particularly like the online courses they offer at the SketchUp Hub.

2. Floorplanner

Using Floorplanner is one of the easiest and best-looking ways to create and share interactive floorplans online. This tool comes with a lot of options for your to customise your plans. With Floorplanner you can recreate your home, garden or office in just a few clicks and furnish your plans with their large library of objects.

3. Autodesk Homestyler

Autodesk Homestyler is an easy to use free drag and drop room planner tool that allows you to easily create floor plans, plus add decorating ideas too.  There is also a library of other designers designs for you to go through and get inspiration from.

4. IKEA

The Swedish design giant offers a planning tool that’s so simple to use, and you can also use their furniture in the space to see whether that sofa that you love fits into the space.  They have planners that cover, kitchens, wardrobes, living rooms and offices.

5. HomeBase

Back here in the UK, Homebase offers a similar online interior design planning tool, in addition to the planner they also have a range of calculators to help you determine how much paint you need, flooring, wallpaper, tiling etc.

And here’s 1 more…

6. Magnet

If you are looking to design your kitchen, then Magnet is the tool for you. Specifically focused on kitchens, you can start from scratch using a completely empty room, or choose a pre-designed room from our set of templates or saved designs. When you’ve got your space, start to fill it with your favourite kitchen cabinets, worktops and accessories. You can even go so far as to add lighting, chairs and plants to your kitchen to make it as real as possible.

Quick and helpful room design tips

Room design software can be a huge help when you’re figuring out exactly how you want to style your space. However, to really make the most of it, you’ll want to have some layout basics down so that you can navigate the features and create a well-crafted room—after all, the whole point of using free room design software in the first place is to create rooms that look professionally designed but without the professional help.

Here are some basic room design tips to follow as you work within the apps:

• Consider traffic patterns – Just as crucial as making sure that everything fits together in a cohesive manner is making sure that there’s room to move about your space. We tend to choose the shortest routes when moving from room to room, so design your rooms in a way that allows for intuitive movement and doesn’t place any obstacles in the way of natural flow.
• Allow areas of unused space – Similar to in paintings and photography, interior design requires unused space (also called negative space) for balance. Don’t feel like you need to fill up every available square foot in the room—sometimes the function of an area is simply to have no function at all.
• Use feng shui principles – Look to the principles of feng shui for ideas on how to arrange your space. This ancient Chinese practice is all about balance, and will provide you with plenty of insight into how to lay out your furniture, how to work with texture and color, and how to design a room that exudes comfort and warmth.
• Include a focal point – All well-designed rooms include a focal point. Think about where the eye will be drawn in a room and then arrange around it. It could be a picture window or fireplace, or it could be a piece of furniture. Whatever your focal point, let that be the guiding force as you work with your room design software and fine tune all of the details in a space.
• Don’t neglect lighting – Lighting has a huge impact on the overall look and feel of a room. Use these free room design software tools to play around with different lighting choices, accounting for all three of the main types of lighting within a room: ambient lighting, task lighting, and accent lighting. Take a look at our guide on how to choose lighting for additional tips on selecting and layering light fixtures within your home.
• Use rugs to anchor furniture – Rugs do more than provide comfort. A well-placed rug helps divide your space visually and functionally, and provides borders within which to arrange your furniture. As such, you may want to lay rugs first when working with your 2D and 3D room designs to anchor everything that’s to come. Rugs are particularly useful for when you’re designing a small room that you want to make feel bigger.

Conclusion

So you want to redesign your living space but need some ideas. It can be hard to get perspective when you’re in the same environment every day and it’s tough to visualize how a new look will actually play out in reality. This is where virtual room designing tools come in handy. They allow you to create a stylized representation of your current space and put together ideas for how it could look with a few changes.