Features:

  • The Design Planning Center provides advice, decorating guidelines, tips and techniques from the editors of the Better Homes and Gardens magazine
  • Browse library items with a full 3D preview before you place them in your design
  • 4,000 library items to customize and create designs and 500 landscaping plants
  • Place an image of your house in a plan, and design landscapes an other exterior elements to quickly visualize changes
  • Over 1,000 cabinets combinations to choose from customize using unlimited styles and colors
A lot more than I expected

It has been nearly 15 years since I tried using a "home design" style of program. It took awhile for me to understand the basics (where to start and manipulation of display). Once the "light bulb" became fully illuminated, I was on my way. I have read the complaints of this being a "skeletal" version of the "Suite" version--this maybe true--I was blown away by amount of "fixtures" this one has. You probably wouldn't substitute this for a blue-print when it comes to accuracy, but it sure beats trying to free sketch something. I may upgrade to the Suite version later (they do offer some discount for current owners of their software. Better Homes and Gardens also offers some free templates to download (I haven't done that yet). For less than 4 sawbucks I consider it a steal from Amazon. I forgot to mention there is a video DVD that covers virtually everything you need to know about the program.

Nice software, no need to be online like the newer versions for demos

This the best budget home design software there is. It is well supported and there are lots of tips, writeups, howtos and videos online. The competing products just don't have the community support. The beauty of V8 is it comes with all the training videos. The newer versions do not. If you are expecting to design your dream home in two hours, I can guarantee you will be frustrated. This software requires quite a bit of time commitment. You can get going in a couple of hours, but your time is best spent watching the videos first, then playing around a bit. The reality is you will spend a whole weekend to do a complete house. -If you are not good with computers, and have issues just doing basic tasks, this is going to be so over your head (as are all the other serious design packages), your best bet is to find one of the web based tools for beginners. -If you are concerned about disk space, the actual program is about 300 megs, the videos are about 2.5 gig, you can install either or both. -Software requires admin to install, UGH! and then even though you tell it to install to another drive, it still creates a directory in C:\Program Files\xxxx to put some crap in, really poor design there.

Home Designer Software

Very pleased with this software. I bought it becaused we are having a house built and I wanted the capability to plan the set up of my kitchen.

Great!!

This program was delivered directly to our daughter for her birthday. She was absolutely delighted to upgrade her home designs while retaining her previous ones. She was especially thrilled with some of the features she didn't expect it to have. It arrived on her birthday, even though we ordered it on short notice. Thanks for making her birthday special!

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