How To Build A Dream House Online With FloorPlanner

Congratulations! You have decided to start designing a home and you are looking for somewhere to start. There are many free services that will help you build your dream home but one of them REALLY stands out as being an excellent tool in building, designing and displaying your floor plans.

FloorPlanner is free for personal use and they have paid accounts for professional designers or someone looking to create a lot of floor plans. Let’s see how it works and get you started building the home of your dreams!

We will start off by visiting their website and signing up for the free personal FloorPlanner account. When you arrive at their homepage you will see this:

We will get started and create a free FloorPlanner account, This lets us create one home. If you need more plans feel free to upgrade to a Plus account but it will cost you a annual fee.

They ask for your email address and a password. Go ahead and fill in the information and then we can get started.

After we are all signed up and logged in we will see a grid like you see below:

Now if you have ever played The Sims you will feel right at home!

The designing will be drag and drop. You will see this box on your right hand side of the screen that allows you to choose what you want to place and then we can drag it to where we want it to go. Before we start placing objects we should build our rooms and structures using the construction tool.

I chose the draw room tool on the top left of the tool bar and then used my mouse to “draw” the room. Simply click and drag to size your room like this:

Next we should add a door to our room, after all we do need to get in and out of the room right? So choose the door tool – which is the fourth tool on the construction panel and drag it to where you want it to go.

Now you are starting to get the hang of it! Create more rooms, add a staircase, create another floor or just work on a single floor of your home. Whatever you want to do, you can do! I went ahead and created a few more rooms like so:

Let’s add a staircase and work on the second floor. Choose the staircase from the structural category as you see below and drag the one you like to where you want it to go. Remember the staircase severely cuts into your space so choose wisely where you want it to go so you can maximize your living area. I am in no way an architect but this is common sense!

I added my spiral staircase (I love these!) and a few windows by simply dragging them where I want them to go as you can see below:

Alright now to switch to our second floor, hit the button and choose new design to create the second floor. For this session we will not be building the second floor.

We will now add some styling to our design and distinguish what rooms are what. I added a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom and a foyer as you can see below:

Make sure you save your file by hitting the save now link towards the top of the screen. You can now also view it in 3D like so:

We would love to see what our creative readers can come up with so share your links or images with us in the comments!