Home Designer Professional 8
The Home Designer Professional 8 is a fantastic software suite that could easily be used for a business tool to design professional quality home blueprints.
Ease of Use, Performance: 23/25, Look & Feel: 22/25,
Features 25/25, How much I enjoy 25/25
Total: 95/100
While this may not be the best and most fully featured software suite for designing homes that a professional engineer or architect would use it is one that has all the needed features. I could easily see a home designer using Home Designer 8 Professional to give a full and complete set of blueprints to a builder or contractor.
The Home Designer 8 Professional edition is the third software suite for designing a home that I have reviewed from Better Homes and Gardens collection for home design. Chief Architect creates these software programs and also has their own line of professional software for home design but this is the best you get at the user level.
This program is by no means to be used for the professional building home plans and selling them to customers, but it would not surprise me one bit if someone was. This complete a home design suite is going to cost and this one does, about $500 but is so complete that you can go from not knowing much about home design to a blueprint in a few short weeks.
While I have spent some time working with this and other Chief Architect programs I have learned alot dealing with home design and construction from them. I do have a little background in construction but nothing more than common sense and having a very handy attitude as well as several years of volunteering at Boy Scout camps and a handy father who taught me some.
It may surprise you readers, and even Chief Architect, to know that I do not do this kind of reviewing often and the line of Better Homes and Gardens software is the first I have used. But I have learned a lot and know so much more about home design and you can too.
The full pro version of Home Designer 8 comes with a video tutorial DVD with 70 videos to help you learn things from the defaults of the program to changing roof planes and framing. The program allows you to build your dream home from placing blocks of rooms down on a blank slate and arranging them how you want to framing and adding electrical, plumbing and landscaping.
You probably have seen those blue print drawings with the big square of information in one corner or side that has all those neat views of the building and floor plans. You can create those with Home Designer 8 Pro easily with the layout mode of the software.
There are two main modes that are part of your software package; plans for an individual drawing and layouts for a combined sheet of drawings or plans for printing. You can easily start or work on either and add a plan drawing to a layout or create custom templates for your layouts quickly. Those square information boxes that start all plans and blueprints are a few minutes away using the CAD and text tools.
Simply open a new layout, draw the boxes you like for name, address, date and any other pertinent information that needs to be included for permits or building plans and add in the information with the text tool. After you have your final information box called Blueprint Title Blocks you would save the layout as a template plan by just saving to a location you will remember and naming it accordingly.