Device Squad: Construction sites

The job New floors

mannington.com
Years of wearing winter boots and playing Dance Dance Revolution have scuffed your parquet, but do you know your Jatoba from your Calabria? If you do, then thanks for reading, Martha Stewart. But for everyone else who hasn’t an inkling that the former is a hardwood and the latter is a porcelain tile, this flooring company’s Virtual Decorator application will keep you from looking like a complete amateur at the hardware store. To determine if you should splurge on vintage oak or just stick with affordable laminate, upload your home’s pics and comb through thousands of color, size and shading options. When you’re finished, you’re presented with a handy list of materials that should earn you props the next time your buddy crashes on your floor.

The job Painting

benjaminmoore.com
Like running a marathon and becoming a North Korean dictator, banishing white walls requires proper planning. To prevent your shade selection from transforming your bedroom into Elton John’s closet, paint maker Benjamin Moore’s Personal Color Viewer provides a sneak peak at more than 3,000 hues in 35 different sample rooms, including a home office and kid’s nook. You can also fiddle with the tones of virtual trims and accents before saving your color profile and printing out your latex combo to tote to Janovic. If you’re deadlocked between two choices, upgrade to a $10 downloadable program (or request it via CD-ROM) that lets you fiddle with the palette on snapshots of your dwelling, so you have a better idea of how Sweet Naivete or Grandfather Clock will look behind your collection of death-metal posters.

The job Tinkering with your decor

bhg.com
The gang at Better Homes & Gardens magazine treat interior design like it’s their job—probably because it is. Fortunately, you can take advantage of their expertise without shelling out for a subscription. Simply click tools on the website’s bottom navigation bar for six shockingly fun design exercises, including Color-a-Room, Arrange-a-Room, Plan-a-Garden and Arrange-a-Deck. You’ll only be able to experiment on their setups—and not your own—but it’s escapist entertainment at its best for any lifelong renter. Will you ever have a deck? Probably not. Do you want to see how a hot tub would fit on one? Hell yes!

The job New furniture

thomasville.com
Instead of sketching a rough diagram of your living room or consulting a feng shui expert, get a better grasp of where to stick your Ikea love seat via this North Carolina furniture company’s gratis Room Planner (hidden in the site’s right-hand corner), which offers customizable online floor plans. First, type in your digs’ dimensions and then select the type of space. A blank grid will pop up, in which you can drop dressers, mirrors and desks, dragging them around the room using your mouse and not your back. Though the program defaults to Thomasville merchandise, which you can order from the site, there are plenty of generic furniture shapes you can adopt to see how an accent chair or baby grand piano will complement your enormous bathroom.

The job Blowing the whole thing up

floorplanner.com
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that there are no second acts in American lives, but he never said a peep about American homes. To give your crumbling cottage another lease on life, brainstorm using this extremely detailed, SimCity-like program. Beginning with a blank grid, construct your brand-new McMansion or apartment by adding walls, furniture, fixtures and anything else. You can even write notes directly on the floor plan and color in the items to make the two-dimensional silhouettes feel more realistic. The only drawback: Non-paying members can work on just a single project, while subscribers (from $29 for a year) can save up to five separate plans and turn their work into 3-D representations, which we suspect would rock Fitzgerald’s world.