Extreme Makeover: Italian Edition - Our Toolbox

Resources & Tools We Used

I am not very good at visualizing space on paper. If someone says a room is 5 meters square or 20 square feet, I don't have any idea about how big the room is in reality. We used several tools - both digital and analog that made all the difference in designing our renovation project.

First, we signed up for the free version of floorplanner.com. This helped my husband and I play around with different floorplan designs - take down a wall here, put a window there, etc. We ended up using the paid version because of some of the added features, such as pdf exporting, which allowed us to share and better communicate with our construction team.

At the time, Floorplanner.com was only about $15 a year, but they have since added many new features and changed their pricing model. Floorplanner.com was an invaluable tool for us, and I highly recommend it for any of your renovation projects. Not only can you manipulate floorplans, but you can play with furniture placements and apply real products as finishes. We were able to select the actual tile we used in our home.

Side note: My professional floorplans and attention to detail are how I ended up with the nickname of 'L’Architetto' or 'The Architect' with the Sicilian Team.  Interesting fact: only in 2017 did the Order of Architects make it possible to request a professional stamp with the use of the feminine equivalent of this word -'L' Architetta.' Still, its usage has not caught on everywhere.

We also used its sister site, Roomstyler.com, to help us create these fantastic 4K resolution virtual reality images of decorated spaces. Floorplanner.com has adopted some of the Roomstyler.com features into its website recently, so you may not need both products now.

However, Roomstyler.com has an active community forum where we asked for ideas and input on how to decorate and arrange our rooms. Many of the suggestions ended up in the finished project!

We made one of our rooms public and asked to the forum to come up with ideas.

We bought a Handheld Digital Laser Measurer that uses both the metric and imperial systems. We used this regularly in our apartment, family members' homes, and other spaces to help us better conceptualize the areas we were designing.

Blue painters tape was by far the most low-tech tool in our toolbox but the most effective. This was for mapping out life-size floorplans that we could actually stand and walk around in.

Imjustmatthew [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]