There are people reading this who will appreciate this scenario: you pay thousands of pounds for an architect to design your loft extension or new kitchen, to find that you spend far too long trying to tell them how you expect it to look and feel. Of course, time is money and whilst you’re trying to portray your opinion, your architect will be charging you for this consultation.

A better solution would be to do the basic design yourself. It’s not that difficult. If you studied design technology at school, grab some gridded paper sketch out your plan and then layout where you want your walls, doors, windows, units and more. Write a specification document including an idea of the materials you require and your architect should be able to design up a plan. There might be a good chance that your architect may ignore your plan entirely, so why not go one stage further and take your 2D plan and design up a 3D render using specialist software?

Sweet Home 3D is a tool that you can use to design a 3D plan of your intended room or extension. As it’s an opensource free application, users are allowed to create their own objects, so if you take a look at the Sweet Home 3D website you’ll find various objects which you can download and drop in to your new design.

Note that this requires Java. The download here is for the Windows version, although Mac and Linux versions are also available from the Sweet Home 3D website.