Jaye2010

Thanks, I think that would be a lot easier to do. I'll give it a try.

Okay, I think I figured it out. Rather than investing in very expensive flooring estimator software, we can use Home Designer to display and manipulate tile placement. You can create in Photoshop or import a .grid in png or .gif to do your work. First, count the squares in both directions. Secondly, multiply each square times the size, e.g. 12 inches and add the grout spacing for each tile. If the grid is 40 squares wide by 32 squares tall, your tile is 12", and your spacing is 1/4", you would multiply 40 x 12 1/4" and 32 x 12 1/4" to arrive at the grid size. Keep in mind that for every four tiles, you will have four 1/4" gaps, or will have to add one inch. So four tiles = 48" + 1" or 49" (4' 1"). Next you will have to scale the grid to size. I created a temporary room using interior walls. I placed the walls to form a rectangle with the inner wall measurements to the size of the grid (40' 10" x 32' 8"). Then I stretched the grid to fit into that room to make the grid of tiles to scale. Selecting the tile is a bit of work, but once you can achieve this, you now have a tile overlay that you can drag over your room. I used the arrow keys to manipulate the placement in order to find a best fit. This is especially helpful when you have different walls, doors, and rooms. By doing this, you don't come up with a surprise like having to make a 2" border around a wall or cut a 3" triangle for an angled wall. While this might not be a perfect fit, it does bring you into the ballpark. Sadly, Home Designer doesn't have layers, and that should be a feature to include. This does beat the price of the big ticket flooring estimator software rentals though.

I would like to use Home Designer to scale various rooms like kitchens, adjoining hallways, and other rooms to scale in order to determine a best fit when installing either ceramic tile or a suspended ceiling grid, especially where there are more complex layouts. In the past, I've created an array of grouped boxes in Microsoft Word or Excel and overlayed those boxes onto a layout of the rooms where I nudged the boxes to see where the final placement would look the best. Unfortunately, you cannot use those programs to build to an exact scale, but through tedious patience, you can come close. I've replicated boxes that were 12 1/4" square to include the 1/4" gap, but HD does not allow me to group them as an object. Anyone know how to represent a group of tiles in 2D mode?