It’s not everyone that can easily visualise a 2D plan as a 3D space. Whilst architects and contractors are used to this automatic in-head conversion, it’s typically a much much more challenging task for the rest of us.
Help us Visualise Our Plans
In purchase to help with this I considered learning Sketch Up or something similar to create a 3D model from our own plans myself. However, around the same time I found a company in Ireland advertising a service on Facebook to do the same for an affordable price.
Homestead Studio
To get the project underway we emailed a PDF copy of our plans over to the men at Homestead Studio.
In addition we sent through a room list along with a Pinterest image or 2 for each one to give the men an idea of how we thought of the finishes and furniture etc.
This really made a difference too, as the virtual house felt much much more personalised when we received it around 2 weeks after our initial contact with the company.
Some of the Pinterest images we sent to Homestead
Invaluable
The ability to ‘walk’ around your home before it’s built is really invaluable. The virtual model is saw in a web browser and it works on my iphone as well as my laptop. That’s been terrific as you always have access to your house when something pops into your head and you need to check it.
I used the iPhone’s screen capture facility to record a little video as I moved round the house. This gives us a permanent record of the model ought to the online version disappear in the future.
There are things we saw and changes we were able to make that we would never have thought of without the 3D model. It also offered an insight into the details that could easily be dropped from our budget, whilst highlighting others that will be important to get the look we have always imagined.
The Cost
In the end we paid just €195 (~£175) for an interior 3D walk through of our entire house. We’ve also paid for a few updates to the model over the last few months as we’ve made some changes, all at very sensible rates. This was unquestionably the best value across all the money we spent during the planning phase. It’s even much more outstanding that this was created from a PDF of our drawings, without a DWG / DXF CAD file.
There’s an example of their work embedded below. click on the arrow and wait for the circle to fill as the project loads into your browser. then use your mouse to relocation around (there are lots of other examples of virtual Walkthroughs on the Homestead studio website too).
I have no connection to Homestead studio other than being a very satisfied customer. highly recommended.
homesteadstudio.ie
Remember to check out our Instagram to follow the project, read the rest of the Automated home 2.0 blog messages and find the links to all the products we’ve used in our self-build.
NOTE THIS IS NOT OUR plan – just a sample from Homestead Studio
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