Measure twice, cut once - Multicom offers Better Homes and Gardens Planning Your Home CAD program, Brodbund's 3D Home Architect Edition 2.0 drawing program, Softdesk's Planix Home Designer 3D - includes related article on home repair CDs

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1996 by Jonathan Price, Lisa Price

YEARS AGO, WHEN WE WERE ABOUT TO MOVE INTO A tiny apartment, we wondered if all our living room furniture would fit. So we measured the dimensions of the furniture and drew an outline of the room on graph paper, figuring each light-blue box as one square foot; using another sheet, we cut out pieces of all the furniture, at the same scale, and labeled every tiny table and chair. Then we positioned and repositioned the paper miniatures to come up with a floor plan that, we thought, would work. And it did. Unfortunately, we didn't do the same thing for the bedroom. The result: We had to climb over a low dresser to get into our bed.

Creating accurate floor plans before you set up your office can mean the difference between enjoying your work space and avoiding it. But recently, we've found something better than graph paper, something that will save you countless hours with scissors and pens: software that helps you lay out a room, redesign an addition, and even create a whole new house.

We found that these programs let us view incredibly precise models of our furniture and appliances and even outline wiring and plumbing schemes so that we would emerge with a design that was clear enough to follow, within a fraction of an inch. These programs range from easy-to-get-started drawing packages to the fully featured computer-aided design (CAD) programs used by architects. All of them have predesigned floor plan templates that you can change any way you want, or you can design everything yourself from scratch. And all let you "walk" around your design in three dimensions to see how your layout will look from different angles. We tested a number of products with the aim of redesigning our home office. Here are our favorites.

Get the Blues. If you want an extremely advanced program that will give you a workable blueprint, go for Better Homes and Gardens Planning Your Home (Multicom, 800-850-7272; Win; $35). Officially, this is a CAD program--giving you a blueprint symbol glossary to help you understand the markings--but it strives to be a kind of hybrid. It offers more than 550 different home plans, which you can pare down to one particular room design that you like. Once you decide on a plan, the Floor Plan Editor will let you modify it to more accurate specifications.

Planning Your Home didn't include a floor plan that featured a home office, but we were able to alter a bedroom to suit our needs. We selected furniture and equipment from a list of more than 100 items, from a credenza to a fax machine. The program is like having an architect and financial wizard rolled up into one. It helps you figure out how much you need to spend on a project, and if you need a home-equity loan, it will calculate your monthly payments based on your bank's current interest rate.

Get in Order. Many products say that they are intuitive, but 3D Home Architect Edition 2.0 (Broderbund, 415-382-4700; Win; $69) really is, even if you've never used a drawing program in your life. It takes you by the hand every step of the way. We wanted to add a door going from our office to the garage; the program stepped in to warn us that we were trying to put the door too close to a corner. We then added some color--from a large selection--to the walls and chose our furniture. 3D Home Architect let us move around effortlessly until we had everything in the right spot. When we were finished with our redesign, all of the specifications flowed into a materials list and, from there, to a cost estimator. In the end we had a complete shopping list and the confidence that comes from knowing that what we would buy would fit. In addition, by exporting our design to a CAD program using a DXF file format, we could get blueprints.

If you want realistic furnishings, Complete Home Designer (Alpha Software, 800-451-1018; Win; $70) features more than 100 office and computer-related products. By experimenting with the more than 600 wallpaper, carpeting, and fabric samples, we got a sense of what our home office would look like when finished, even down to the position of lights and where shadows would fall at different times of the day.

And then there's Planix Home Designer 3D (Softdesk, 800-231-8574; Win; $59). You can do almost everything with this program since it contains 500 floor plans that you can edit to your taste. The accompanying manual, however, is more than 300 pages, making learning the program a rather laborious affair. But you can design anything you want in your office, from an elaborate phone and electrical setup to an alarm system. Planix lists office furniture and equipment that you can rearrange once you have the basic room outlines drawn.

Get Down to Basics. If you're looking for ease of use, check out Home Design 3D 4.5 (Expert, 800-759-2562; Win 95; $13). We were able.to design the outline for the office faster with this program than with any of the others. We loved creating paint for the interior walls and moldings. We started with the program's suggestions and quickly began to mix our own palette. You can export the file to a number of CAD drawing programs if you want a blueprint. Home Design 3D offers most of the basics, such as 54 different styles of desks, file cabinets, and bookcases plus some computer equipment that you can size to your specifications, but it doesn't offer such fancy capabilities as arranging electrical wiring or designing a plumbing system. Moving the objects around the room is easy and you can adjust the furniture size at any time.