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Space Planning 101 With the Icovia Design Edition Space Planner

Tuesday, January 06 2009 - icovia

Over at openhouse.homegoods.com Cathy posted a good article titled Space Planning 101. In it she explains how to do basic space planning using nothing but a tape measure and some graph paper. She also suggests you try Icovia if you want to do something online. I thought I would duplicate her design using the just released v5 of Icovia's Space Planner.

The first step is to create the room itself. The welcome screen on the Icovia Space Planner gives me the option to create a room with specific dimensions, however, if you look at Cathy's design you will see that her room is actually open on the southern wall. So the first thing to do is create the basic dimensions: 14'3'' x 13'. Once that is done I click on the southern wall on my plan and then click on the red X.

Once that is done I need to draw 2 more walls; one for the left side and one for the right. The first step is to draw the walls away from the rest of the room. Once I have the wall the size I want I simply move it over, lining it up with the existing corners. Once that is done, I then drag the Orange Box slightly to the left (or right for the right wall). The new shorter wall will join with the existing wall to form a corner and remain the size I originally created it at.

Next I need to add the windows. The left side of the Icovia Space Planner has numerous window options and sizes under the structural menu. Since I really don't have a preference I'm just going to place a basic window and make it the size Cathy indicated.

Now that is done I can start placing furniture. Before I do that I want to make sure I don't accidentally move any of the walls or windows. To "lock" the plan as is I select the following menu:

Edit -> Lock -> Lock Everything

At this point my plan shape is complete and I can't move or alter any of the structural items. It's time to place my furniture. Cathy has a wood floor with some carpets on top. Let's create that look first.

On the Symbols tab I select Furniture and then rugs. Now, in order to create a rug with two colors, I need to place two rug icons. One will be larger than the other. Once the rugs are down I can apply the color and move them into position. When I happy with how the rug looks I can "group" them together so they represent a single icon. This way one of them won't shift out of place on me.

In order to group the rugs together I click on one rug and then, while holding the shift key, click on the next rug. Then, from the pop-up window, I select the padlock and the grouping icon.

I want to add the hardwood floor pattern to my plan. In order to do that I have to "unlock" the floor surface. To do that I use the Edit -> Unlock -> Unlock Everything menu. Then I click on the floor (gray surface inside the walls). That brings up a window with a color tab and a patterns tab. I just click on the patterns tab and select the pattern I want. Once I'm done I relock everything.

Now I'm ready to add the rest of the furniture. Since this is a living room, I'll stick with the Furniture symbol menu and then select living room. The plant can be found under the plants / incidentals menu and of course the table under the table menu.

Once the plan is done I can Export it as an Image (that is how most of the images I put in this post were created), Share it with a friend via Email, or print it including an itemized list of what is in my plan and the sizes of everything.

Take a look at my finished plan and compare it to Cathy's. Do you see the difference? In my plan it looks like there is more space available than hers. Why is that?

If you look at the bottom left of her plan she put 44" as the distance between the wall and the couch, but if you calculate the distance based upon the carpet distance from the wall and the width of the carpet border you can see that something is wrong. Her numbers don't add up. I came up with 26". Also, some of the furniture, the chairs for example, are drawn larger than they should be, so they appear to take up more space. That isn't a slight against Cathy, but it does show you that planning with a tool like the Icovia Space Planner can keep you from making mistakes.

Got a room you want to plan? Leave me a comment with a way to contact you and I'll be sure to see that you get a discount coupon code.