While You’re at Home: The Renovation Design Challenge

The coronavirus has pushed many of us indoors — like it or not.

If you had plans to build a new house or to renovate, we feel your pain. But this is a good time to refine your ideas and start planning.

We have put together a few resources that will help you keep moving forward.

If we have school-aged children, suddenly we’re teachers now too. So for kids at home with an interest in design, engineering or building, we’ve handpicked a few apps to keep them engaged as well.

Apps for Home and Renovation Design

Most of these apps are free with in-app purchases or they have a small price tag.

MagicPlan – Floor Plan Creator

This is nifty and useful. Use your phone or tablet to scan the room and capture floor plans of the space. t takes about 30 seconds. You can scan every room in your house if you want to and piece them together.

After that, you can add photos to make the spaces more realistic and easily visualised for your planning.

The app is free for the basic version and allows you to create unlimited floorplans, add pictures, objects, and notes.

The Business version allows you to export the files, make virtual tours, and add third-party integrations.

Magicplan is available on Google Play and the App store

Morpholio

Morpholio is the name of the company, but also a suite of apps including Morpholio itself. This is the app of choice for creative people including architects, designers, artists, photographers, and enthusiasts.

Morpholio Trace, which is the drawing app for building. It allows the user to sketch and design plans including outdoor spaces as well as indoor. It promises to offer “the beauty and speed of sketching with the precision and intelligence of CAD.”

There is also Morpholio Board for creating mood boards for interior design and decoration.

Morpholio Journal is for writing, sketching and collecting ideas for the creative project you are working on.

As a professional standard, the functionality is quite extraordinary.

Free with in-app purchases. Only available on the App store.

Home Design 3D

Home Design 3D offers to be for everyone from students to professionals. Anyone with an interest should find this easy to use.

You can use the app to design your floorplan in 2D or 3D.

You can furnish and decorate the space to create semi-realistic scenarios for decoration and furniture choices.

There are a few apps with the same name, but this one is available phones, tablets, and desktop computers — both PC and Mac. There are tutorials available to help you get started, but the interface is user-friendly.

For Kids with an Interest in Building, Design, or Engineering

With children no longer at school, we shortlisted a few apps they can use to supplement their home-school curriculum, depending on their age.

Truss me!

We love Truss Me! because it uses physics-based simulations to show kids how to design structures while playing.

The simulator uses slender bars. By designing with the bars, kids can find out whether a structure will work or fail.

Amazing Alex

Amazing Alex is physics gamified to the ultimate degree.

From the makers of Angry Birds, Amazing Alex is a puzzle game in which the user tries to get the ball into the hoop using objects like pipes, buckets, seesaws, and boxing gloves. There is more than one right solution.

The scenarios include a classroom, bedroom, backyard, and treehouse, each with different levels. I suppose you wouldn’t have to be a child to enjoy playing this one.

Building Apps

If the child is very young but is allowed to use devices, there are a slew of apps that don’t contain monsters or scary stuff and will help them build.

Check out Blocksworld or Blox3d Junior

Five to 11-year-olds might enjoy Toca builders.