Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

App Smart

Before Tearing Out a Wall, Check Your Phone

I’m never more inspired to tackle a home improvement project than after watching a TV show in which an attractive expert rejuvenates a living room in a day, for less than $200.

Then I realize all I need to complete the project is $200. And that attractive expert to help. Gratis.

These attractive experts do not yet live in one’s mobile device, but apps are doing an increasingly good job at taking their place — even offering step-by-step video instruction. And some of them actually are free.

That includes the first on my list of best apps for home improvement aspirants, Houzz (free on Apple). At its core, Houzz is a glorious design gallery featuring more than 260,000 high-resolution photos. It is also one of the rare nongaming apps with an average iTunes rating of five stars, after thousands of reviews, and the ratings are well deserved.

The thought of sifting through 260,000 of anything, no matter how beautiful, is a bit daunting. But Houzz makes the process painless, by sorting photos according to style or metro area. You can also search by keyword or phrase — “reclaimed lumber,” for instance — and find matches.

Image
The HomeDesign3DiPad app, showing a rendering of a room, and an option for changing the color of a surface.

If Houzz somehow does not satisfy your needs, Dwell (free on Apple and Android) is another good app that offers modern design ideas, but with videos and text in addition to photos. It is designed for smaller devices only, but even stretched onto the iPad’s bigger screen, the app was useful.

If your project involves a marginal rearrangement or full reinvention of a room, download Home Design 3D by LiveCad ($6 for iPad, $4 for iPhone), with free trial versions for iPhone and iPad.

This is one cool app. Home Design is a slimmed-down version of a desktop PC application that costs $44 and is bought mostly by professional designers and homeowners who cannot leave well enough alone. The mobile app is for people with the opposite problem: those who don’t even know how to start.

In this case, you start by dragging a finger across the screen to create a room with the dimensions of one in your home. This is, naturally, an easier and more aesthetically pleasing process on an iPad than on a smaller device. Next, you drag furniture, fixtures, windows and doorways to the room, and adjust their measurements to conform to the features of your room. You can then press a button and view the room in 3-D. In the 3-D view, you can change the colors of anything you like, or put wood paneling or floorboards into place. To rearrange the furniture, re-enter the 2-D mode and drag things where you like.

Android users must wait until later this year for this app to appear on the platform. Meanwhile, Home Design 3D is available for $4.79. It has attracted much lower ratings among users than its Apple competitor, but it has a free “demo” version so you can gauge the app’s value yourself before splurging on the full version.

Once the brainstorming sessions are done and you are ready to go to work, a few how-to apps will come in handy.

Home Depot (free on Apple and Android) is among the more useful apps to emerge from a mainstream retailer. You must select a physical Home Depot store from a list of locations before the app shows its full range of features.

Image
The Houzz app for iPad is one of the rare nongaming apps with an average iTunes rating of five stars.

An especially valuable one is the Calculator. If you are considering new drywall for a room, for instance, the app prompts you to select the dimensions of the walls, then tells you the amount of wall panels, screws, nails and joint tape to buy.

The app’s Toolbox section includes, among other tools, a caliper and a “Nut and Bolt Finder,” which determines the exact dimensions of a fastener and saves that information for your shopping trip.

The app also includes a video section, but only some of the videos are useful. Few homeowners need to watch a promotional video of how a particular company’s hardware is made, for instance. (That clip was in the “Projects” section, as if someone might want to fabricate some hardware.) Another video is a five-minute segment from a Martha Stewart show, in which she transforms a bathroom with Home Depot products. It was more of an overview than a tutorial. But another video was narrated by a plumbing expert, and clearly explained how to replace a toilet’s float valve.

The Lowe’s app does not have the tools of Home Depot’s app, but it compensates for that shortcoming with a considerably more effective slate of how-to videos. One on deadbolt installation, for example, explains the process from multiple angles, and includes an animated explanation of a door’s “backset,” which is the distance from the edge of the door to the center of the hole that holds the deadbolt.

If I were in the market for only a free app, I would load the apps from both Home Depot and Lowe’s onto my phone, and look to Lowe’s videos first. Otherwise, I would download HandyMan DIY ($2 on Apple), which features text-based instructions for various projects, along with a list of materials needed for a job.

HandyMan also includes good video guides for various tasks, but the videos are selected from YouTube. The one on installing faucets, for instance, was produced by Lowe’s. If, after reviewing the instructions, you decide to embark on a project, you can start a new page in the app, with a checklist for materials, a to-do list and other pages that help you manage the project and track its cost. It’s well designed and worth the money, even if the videos come from elsewhere.

Quick Calls

Turn your photos and narratives into a comic book with the aptly named Comic Book! ($2 on Apple). ... Nuance’s Dragon Go, a free, Siri-like personal assistant app popular on Apple, is now available on Android. ... Looking for more app suggestions? See Kinetik (free on Apple).

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Before Tearing Out a Wall, Check Your Phone. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT