Design a Kitchen Easily With IKEA Home Planner - bruggemaninden1957

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Impressive graphics
Offers business-like tools for free

Our Verdict

Ikea Home Planner lets you design the kitchen of your dreams–as longitudinal as it's filled with Ikea products, of course.

I'm not an designer or an designer, but I sure like to pretend I am. I have plenty of ideas about how to improve my house, especially its 1970s-era kitchen. That's why I'm having so much fun with Ikea's Home Planner, a free, befog-based application that lets me design the kitchen of my dreams–as long as it's filled with Ikea products, of course.

Ikea's Dwelling Planner doesn't in reality Lashkar-e-Taiba you plan dead your entire home; it's restricted to kitchen and dining areas. (Ikea does concern thereto as the Kitchen planner in just about places on its site, and also offers a Pax planner, a separate application that lets you intention the inward of its wardrobe products.) The Entanglement-supported application hind end be a bit slow to load, merely information technology's eminently usable.

When you commence a late imag, you can prefer to start from scratch, with a bare way,or, if that choice seems to a fault intimidating, you can opt to start with one of Ikea's pre-designed spaces. Luckily, designing a visualise from lettuce isn't too difficult. You start by selecting the room shape, and Ikea includes enough options– including those with indents and diagonal cutouts–to fulfil the needs of most people. You seat adjust the size of your walls, but Ikea's measurements swear happening the metric system, thus if you'Re in the US, you'll make to get your meter stick out Beaver State be ready to do the conversions connected your own.

Once the walls are in place, you add your windows and doors. You can buoy click from a list of options (much as interior and exterior doors or interior openings); thus umpteen are easy that I started to feel slightly overwhelmed. I mat up even more so when it was time to add the real center of the kitchen: cabinets, shelves, and appliances. The Ikea Home Contriver is much like a digital variation of the Ikea catalog, allowing you to choose between reinforced-in cabinetwork and free-standing items with names like Bjursta and Udden. If you find yourself bewildered in the endless options that the catalog provides–to state nothing of a visit to an existent Ikea store–you may find your head spinning as you sample to decide whether you should use Tyda handles and a birch tree veneering, and if your handles face better along the right or the left.

But sightedness all of the pieces placed in a virtual model of your kitchen makes the process considerably easier, especially when you switch to the impressive 3D view. Once your project is complete, you throne print a copy or save the digital variation to Ikea's server so you can approach it when you'ray in the store. You cannot save a copy to a USB drive, as Ikea will non allow you to expend these kinds of removable storage devices in its stores.

The Ikea Habitation Planner is a very cool tool that makes it painless for casual users to craft professional-looking designs. It's easier to apply than dwelling design products same HGTV Home and Landscape Platinum Suite and Punch Software's Home & Landscape painting Design NexGen (from each one $50). But while these products have a steeper acquisition curve, they also fling exponentially more options, as some earmark you to design complete homes inside and away. Ikea Home Planner will appeal to a much more special audience, as it's express to kitchens shapely with Ikea products.

Note: Clicking the Download button will exact you to the seller's site, where you privy put in this software directly into a supported browser.

—Liane Cassavoy