Life begins when the kid leaves home and you can take over and redecorate her room: iPlanit
Imagine living in a two-bedroom apartment with a husband and his two kids (half the time) with both you and said husband working full time from home. Exactly. In this configuration, my personal space — the space that is an expression of the inner me — amounts to some pictures and doodads on top of a piece of office furniture; a total area of about one square foot.
But now the kids are (mostly) gone. The youngest is about to turn 18 and start college. And I’ll be damned if I’m not about to get myself an office/sanctuary. Desperately need some elbow room…
The “kids’ room” is not that big, and I still have to leave a bed in there for kid weekends and guests. Not being very spatially gifted, I needed to test the feasibility of my diabolical plan, so I looked for an app that I could use to test the furniture layout I had in mind. The free version of iPlanit did the trick and was even fun to use, despite being mildly annoying at times.
Start by grabbing the “Room” square in the toolbar at the left and drag it onto the workspace. With your fingertip, stretch each wall till it reaches the right length. (Tap “Show/Hide” in the top menu bar to display measurements, and “Imperial” if you want to switch to US measurements.)
Because I got the “lite” (free) version, some nice-to-have tools are not accessible, like the rectangle and window shapes. But there are workarounds. I just used the Room shape or Hob (whatever that is, looks like a Lego brick) to make my rectangles. The downside is that once the wall of one room touches another, you can’t pull them apart. If you try to, your room gets all messed up. But you can delete them and start over. And I faked a window using a Wall.
Since I couldn’t get the “Undo” button to work, I occasionally had to delete whatever element I was trying to add. To remove an element, tap it so it turns red. Then tap the “Delete” button at the top. This is also how you get rid of your attached room walls. (Sounds worse than it is.)
You can label various elements. Drag the “T” from the left toolbar onto your shape. Tap the word “Label” so it turns red, and tap “Properties” in the top menu to customize the label.
Pinch and squeeze to shrink or enlarge shapes. Turn them red and then tap “Left” or “Right” in the top menu to flip them horizontally or vertically. You can also rotate using two fingers, but it’s less precise. Rotating doesn’t seem to work with all elements.
I wanted to save the floorplan, so I chose “Export” from the top menu. You have two file format options with the free version (PNG and FPL, which I never heard of). Thing is, I don’t know where it exported to… It didn’t go to my camera roll as far as I can tell. So I took screenshots, which automatically go to the camera roll. Good enough for my purposes.
Devices: iPad
Cost: Free or $19.99
iPlanit “lite”on the App Store
iPlanit “full” on the App Store
