An Easy Room Layout Planner

Details on using a few free and easy room layout planner options to help you plan and design rooms in your home!

I’m jumping into with a rather impromptu post about a really cool (and free!) tool I found Sunday night! It got me thinking that now may be a great time to share a few tips, tricks and software that I use to help with room designs. This can especially be beneficial before ordering a large piece of new furniture or during room renovations or the building process. Now that sheetrock is going up at our new build, I was able to get official measurements of several of the spaces so we can begin planning furniture layout. With that, I love to use free and easy room layout planners that help me visualize (and make sure items will fit)! Today I’ll walk through a few I’ve used to give ideas on how you may find them helpful too!

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Our new build has a lot of similarities to our Omaha home, on a smaller scale. One of those similarities is that, although the rooms are decent size on paper, many have a number of windows and doors that really limit furniture layout options. So, it becomes more critical to do some planning before selecting furniture! For example, two of our upstairs bedrooms (mirror images of each other) have windows on two walls and doors on the other two walls, for a total of three windows and three doors in a 12′-ish by 13′-ish room! I’ll be using this example to walk through some helpful tools I’ve used recently to help with planning a space!

Where To Start With A Furniture Layout Floor Plan

First and foremost, measurements of the space(s) you’re designing are critical. I would argue they don’t need to be 100% accurate (unless you’re ordering something like inside-mount window treatments or need furniture sized perfectly for a wall or niche). Rather, when it comes to general layouts, it’s helpful to get as close as possible, but I wouldn’t stress about it being perfect and just know there is a small margin of error.

I actually ordered this laser tape measure shortly after we moved to Florida and never used it. That is, until this past weekend, and it may very well be one of my favorite finds ever! That might be a bit dramatic, but it certainly makes grabbing room measurements quick and easy! Kurtis was a skeptic at first, so we had to verify our first several measurements with a “real” tape measure. It was perfectly accurate (down to 1/16th of an inch) and in some cases with longer walls, even more accurate because you didn’t have to account for a drooping tape measure! I also love that you don’t need two people to quickly get accurate measurements. It’s now Kurtis’ favorite little gadget, so it would probably make a great Father’s Day/Mother’s Day/birthday gift for anyone that likes projects!

I like to walk around each room with a notebook and grab helpful measurements. That includes the overall room size, but also placement and size of things like doors and windows or other important room features. You’ll want to collect all of these measurements and notes before moving on to the room layout planner step.

Helpful Room Layout Planner Options

I have by no means tried all of the software out there (or even come close)! But, I have found some tools over the years that I find to be fairly straightforward to use. One of which I just found two days ago (but it might be my favorite yet)!

So, once you’ve grabbed your measurements above, it’s time to start the planning process! Although it may sound more fun to start placing furniture, take the time to load your room measurements, door, windows, etc. so that the room on the “paper” is as accurate of a representation of your space as possible. It will help ensure success in your final plans!

RoomSketcher

In the past, I’ve shared RoomSketcher, which I used to help design our pool house. You can see some of my renderings here. If you’re wanting to get super detailed and have fairly life-like 3D renderings when you’re done, it’s a great free option. You can also upgrade to get more furniture, decor, finishes, etc. for even more options. However, it has a bit of a learning curve and may be a bit too comprehensive if you’re just doing a quick room makeover and don’t need things too specific.

Here’s a sample rendering I made through their floor plan designer and then basically captured a snapshot. Again, furniture and accessories are somewhat limited, but you definitely get a feel for scale and flow.

Design Crew Room Planner

Over the weekend, I found this free room planner. I felt like I struck gold because you can quickly throw in a room’s dimensions and then drop in furniture directly from all the Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma brands (including kid’s items and West Elm)! As most of you know, we have a lot of Pottery Barn furniture so it made it super easy for me to drop in the exact furniture we already own to see how and where it would fit. Since this tool is much more simplified, I find it great for quickly figuring out placement, sizing, spacing, etc. Not necessarily super lifelike 3D renderings.

But, if you prefer another retailer, that’s okay! Simply find something from their expansive offerings that has a similar vibe (or even just similar dimensions) to help visualize how furniture and accessories will fit in a space. There are some limitations (and not all products are available to drop into the 3D view), but I could quickly tell where I need to make adjustments in my mental plans.

I’m not going to offer a full tutorial because I’m still learning the process (and it’s fairly simple to use once you play around with it). But essentially, you’ll start by creating your room with the dimensions you took in the step above. Under the Build tab, you can select pre-made room shapes and adjust the wall sizes manually. There is also an Add-Ons option to allow you to drop in some basic window and door options. Again, you can adjust manually to get your exact sizes needed.

From there, you’ll move to the Furnish tab, and can search for products in the various stores’ product listings or SKUs. If an item says “Add To Mood Board” you can add it to a list to be used later (more on that in a bit). All the other items you can click into for more info or simply tap and drag right onto your floor plan. It will let you rotate the item and move around as needed. I’d start with larger furniture and work down from there.

If you have a PB account, it will allow you to store all your board and plans to come back to later! The interface is super minimal and straightforward, so it’s pretty hard to mess anything up.

Let’s jump into a real example so you can see it in action.

An Example Using Design Crew Room Planner

Let’s jump into an example so you can see it in action. Above I mentioned we have two mirror image bedrooms upstairs in the new build. One will be an overflow guest bedroom (when we have someone in the carriage house already) and the other will likely be the “cat room” where we keep their litter boxes and other supplies. So likely that last one won’t have any furniture for now. But, with the other one, I was really hoping to use one of our existing beds rather than buy something new. I also really wanted a king size bed if possible, but in looking at the space when you’re there, it’s super hard to tell if one would fit. Again, there are windows on two sides and doors on the other two sides, for a total of three windows and three doors.

The builder said they had planned for the bed to go on the window wall (not my preference to cover windows). So I really wanted to make it work on the door entrance wall if possible. I simply plugged in all the dimensions to come up with a floor plan and dropped in some furniture to see how it would fit.

I really want to reuse this bed in our new build so I love that I could use the exact item without having to go pull measurements for it (it’s all stored in the software). I knew nightstands would need to be pretty small so I dropped these light wood charging nightstands onto the plan because they’re rather petite.

From there, you can click the little camera icon and it will let you “stand” anywhere in the room and take a photo! This is taken from the side corner, where I could see all three doorways and where they relate to the furniture.

I clearly didn’t have spacing 100% perfect (and these lamps are monstrous on these smaller nightstands). I don’t love that the bed wouldn’t be centered in the room (just on this particular wall) but definitely not a huge issue.

What this exercise taught me is that the bed I really wanted to use likely will work (yay)! But, we may need to plan for smaller, more petite nightstands. In our mind, it’s totally worth the tradeoff to have smaller nightstands if it means you have a roomier (and comfier) bed!

I did something similar in Kurtis’ office. He fully admits he isn’t great at visualizing something, even when he knows measurements and the exact items for a space. So tools like this help me to show my vision to him without him wanting to redo it once he sees it in real-life! He’s going to be using all the furniture I ordered for our Omaha office. Again, after super quick measurements of the room, I had a floor plan.

Here is how it all looks standing in the doorway. He requested cozy and I think he’ll get it! He also wants access to the printer, supplies, filing cabinets, etc. so that takes a lot of that stuff out of my office (yay) and keeps it stored prettily in this set. Since we already own all the storage units, we ordered this desk to easily add to the mix! He has requested the desk be perpendicular to the window so he can view the backyard when he’s on his calls. He’s pretty excited, and loves that he’ll have his first dedicated home office. No more guest bed in the back of his video calls!

Moodboards

In the past, I offered a rather extensive tutorial on how I make moodboards in PicMonkey. They’ve made a few updates to the interface, but overall, the tutorial is still applicable and should still be fairly easy to follow. This will allow you to upload any image or product you prefer to see how various items may or may not work together.

The Pottery Barn software I mentioned above also has a super quick moodboard feature as well. You can pick and choose items (even some they don’t allow you to drag into the floor plan) and get a simple moodboard like the one below. It basically adds all of the products on a quick sheet. If you’re a designer, it also creates a project expense tally by room to easily show your client! I threw a few extra items onto the design above to create this moodboard quickly in their system:

SOURCES: Art | Entertainment Center | Lateral Filing Bookcase | Desk | Bead Chandelier | Lamp | Desk Chair | Olive Tree | Striped Pillow

Again, it’s not a design board where things are layered, but at least visually you can see what will and won’t work together. And just remember, you can still use this tool even if you aren’t shopping at Pottery Barn 100%. Just find something similar, if possible, to get an overall feel for the aesthetic of a space!

I hope you found info on these tools helpful! Again, there are tons of software options out there, but these are two that I’ve really enjoyed using and thought you may as well!

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