If not, help is underway. How about surprising friends and family with a freshly overhauled apartment? I’m sure it’s something they didn’t quite expect when they invited themselves.

Uncluttering and nicely reworking your home and patio decor is also one of the best gifts you can make to yourself. After all, your work and your home are the places where you spent most of your lifetime. Why not make at least one of these places worthwhile?

1. Unclutterer

If most surfaces in your house, i.e. tables, cabinets or floors, are covered with stuff, chances are you have a clutter issue. Unclutterer can help you clear the mess.

One of the best categories to look for hands on advice is Ask Unclutterer.

For those that are fairly organized already, Unclutterer provides tons of helpful Tips to be prepared for the unexpected. Also check out Weekend Projects for tips on how to address small clutter spots.

My recent favorite was categorized into Home Organization and Parties and Celebrations. The article recommends to create a party pantry for spontaneous get togethers and provides a list of items to consider.

2. Instructables – Home Decorating

This is probably the most comprehensive source for do-it-yourself instructions for anything you can imagine, including cheap and easy home decoration.

Check out the home category for more great home and patio decor ideas from the incredibly creative user base of Instructables.

Here is one of my favorite examples:

Invisible Book Shelf

If you’re short on shelf space and have book clutter all over your place, go ahead and create some ultra unique magic shelves yourself.

3. About.com – Interior Decorating

About.com provides an endless wealth of knowledge. If you want to learn about interior decorating, this is the right place to start.

Your first stop should be the Decorating 101 guide, which thoroughly introduces you to the ideas and principles of decoration, design, and style.

A great resource for practical advice is the HowTos Index. Articles include “How To Plan Your Christmas Party Decor”, How To Find a Focal Point in a Room or How To Quick Clean Any Room in the House.

The Holidays & Seasons section contains plenty of inspiration and material for your seasonal home decoration projects. Halloween is almost here and isn’t it time to Countdown to a Perfect Thanksgiving, yet?

4. Rental Decorating Digest

Most of us don’t live in our very own house or apartment. The majority of people rent and there is only so much you can do in a rented apartment.

That’s where Rental Decorating Digest comes in. All tips and guides are compatible with rented space. Below is an overview of the available categories.

One of my favorites is Budget Decorating. Even if you don’t have a lot of money to spend, there is a ton of things you can do to spruce up your home.

5. DoItYourself – Home Improvement and Repair How-To Information

If you own a home, there is a lot you have to take care of. But you also have endless freedom. DoItYourself provides the necessary resources to make your design dreams a reality.

For general tidying up and uncluttering, the Organizing Your Home and Cleaning and Stain Removal categories are a good start.

The site has a separate category for Holidays and Celebrations, which contains an extensive list of articles, including home and patio decor ideas for Halloween Planning, Thanksgiving and Autumn Decorating, Christmas Preparation and Planning, and Christmas Decorating.

For more advice on cleaning, check out my article Cleaning and Stain Removal for Bachelors.

How do you go about uncluttering, cleaning and decorating your home? Helpful advice is always appreciated, the comments are open!

Image credits: barunpatrol

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Create a House Floor Plan with FloorPlanner (11)
• Use Household Register 2010 To Maintain A Home Inventory (6)
• Two Home Inventory Tracking Apps to Insure Your Assets (11)
• The Best Free Websites To Find Foreclosed Houses (8)
• The 4 Proven Simple Tips to Organize Your Files on Windows (19)

When I got my first apartment, it was the same way, but I had the opportunity to plan out more than one room. Unfortunately, the Internet was still in its infancy, and computer software that could generate floor plans were very expensive.

Today, students, apartment renters and home owners now have a very cool web app called FloorPlanner, where you can create a floor plan and place all of your furniture, appliances and more with one simple online application.

Create Any Floor Plan With FloorPlanner

Anthony briefly mentioned FloorPlanner in his article on 3 floor design services, and of course there’s always PlanningWiz, mentioned before at MakeUseOf.  But I wanted to dig a littler further into FloorPlanner to show you how functional and useful this particular web app can be when you’re moving into a new place and simply want to get a look at different ways you could arrange the furniture.

The 3D feature of this application alone makes it well worth a try – why spend all day pushing your furniture around the house when you can get a virtual look at your room set up the way you want it? Don’t like it – then try something else by clicking the mouse!

With the free account, you get access to one “house” but you’re not limited to the number of times you can delete and recreate the floor plan, so this application is a perfect scratch-pad for trying out different room designs.  If you’ve ever played the Sims series of video games, this will definitely feel like you’re playing the game.

You have access to different construction “items” such as walls, windows, doors and more – but you also have access to a long list of furniture and other items such as a couch, television set and even plants.

Each item has enough design choices that you can make your floor plan fairly detailed. The library contains 14 categories from including office, plants, garden objects and even people. You can simply drag and drop the item into your floor plan wherever you like. In this case I’m simulating the design of a dorm room with one door, so first I draw out the four walls and place the door.

You’ll notice, as you create your design, that while you’re drawing out walls or placing windows and doors, the app shows you the exact dimensions in either feet or meters (you can select your choice of units).

Once you’re done building the structural floor plan (this can get even more elaborate if you’re laying out an entire house), then you’re finally ready to start decorating! Now you can start choosing from the room items provided throughout the item library, rather than the construction items you’ve been using up until now.

Controls on the left side of the display screen, reminiscent of the controls on Google Maps, allow you to pan in all directions as well as zooming in and out. Here, you can see that I’ve designed a very retro-sheek layout with authentic leopard skin rug, big screen TV and a stylish mushroom bedside lamp. Yes, that’s a banana plant in the corner – stop laughing.

Now, in my opinion the absolute coolest part of this entire application is that when you click the little “3D” button in the upper right hand corner, the entire display mode changes over to a 3-dimensional representation of the floor plan you’ve just created – complete with little bitty animation on the television screen, how cool is that?

You can rotate the entire design simply by holding the mouse button and sliding the mouse around in any direction. View the room from any angle you like just to see how the layout will actually look in real life. Sometimes, setting up a room works great in your head until you start placing furniture and realize that it won’t work because certain furniture blocks a door or a window.

While the “export to picture” feature is unfortunately disabled in the free account, you still can share your designs with others on the web. Just click on “My Account” and go to your Dashboard. When you click on the green icon under “Actions” the screen above will come up, which provides you with links that you can send to your family and friends, or an iframe script that you can use to embed the design directly on your blog!

Have you ever used any floor plan design applications? Would you use one like this just to try out different room designs? Share your opinion in the comments section below.

FloorPlanner

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Sweet Home 3D: Be An Amateur Architect & Plan Virtual Rooms (5)
• 5 Online Resources To Help You Unclutter & Decorate your Home (3)
• You have no idea what you can do with Images (16)
• Wordle – Become Addicted To RSS Feeds The Fun Way (13)
• Word Bubbles for Dummies. Make your images speak with Kyolo! (10)

Here are a couple of ways you can make your very own motivational posters. Have fun with it or mock. Create motivational posters and take it into the direction you choose.

Motivator by bighugelabs

Motivator allows you to grab any photo from any URL, Flickr page, Photobucket page or upload one yourself. It also allows you to select your own text from a couple of choices, select their colours as well as one for the background or rotate your poster orientation to portrait or keep it at landscape. There is also a choice between single, double and fancy borders for your picture.

After you’re done customizing your poster, click “Create” to see the final product. If you’re happy with it, you can either save it, share it on Flickr or email it to a friend. Members get the privilege of creating links to the poster which is hosted by bighugelabs. Membership is free so why not? PRO memberships will allow you to create high resolution posters which are 3000 pixels on its long edge.

Posters created by Motivator are 750 by 600 pixels in landscape mode and 600 by 750 pixels in portrait.

AutoMotivator

This poster creator has got a slightly nicer font. The rest of it is a little simpler compared with the others. It doesn’t allow you to select a background colour or change the font (although the default one is quite satisfactory). The only parameter it allows for configuration is the text colour which affects the picture border colour, too. And the text, of course.

Still, the resulting posters are pretty nice. They are 608 pixels in width, it doesn’t matter whether the poster is in portrait or landscape mode.

When you’re satisfied with the poster, you’re given the option to upload it to Imageshack, Flickr, save to your computer or order prints via its shop at Zazzle.

Parody Motivator Generator by Despair, Inc.

Despite its name, you can still make motivational posters. Like Motivator, this poster generator will also allow you to select from a few fonts and choose their colours, as well as set its orientation. It will only use uploaded photos. No Flickr or Imageshack photos here, sorry.

After you’ve created the poster, you can save it to your computer, email it to a friend or order an A4 print for $13 from their store.

Posters created with Parody Motivator Generator are 750 pixels on its longer edge. There will also be a small watermark at the bottom right edge of the poster that states it was made from Despair, Inc.

MotivationLOL by BravoBug Software [Mac Only]

MotivationLOL used to be $5 but the nice people over at BravoBug decided to give away this application for free. Download MotivationLOL and use the free license code to activate it.

It’s a very simple application which give you the option of dragging your picture into it, pan it around, zoom in or out until you’re pleased with it then input the tag lines and save. If you find the resulting poster too small, you can simply enlarge MotivationLOL’s application window and the poster size will increase as well.

Have fun customizing your own motivational posters. Do you use any other generators which aren’t listed here? Let us know about it in the comments. Also, take the chance to share interesting (mock) motivational posters with us, again in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Create a House Floor Plan with FloorPlanner (11)
• 5 Online Resources To Help You Unclutter & Decorate your Home (3)
• 3 Floor Design Services to Decorate and Plan your House (8)

Plus you don’t need ANY experience in visual arts whatsoever to use these three services – Floorplanner, SeeMyDesign and previously profiled MyDeco .

Floorplanner

Floorplanner is an interactive, drag-and-drop, browser-based program that allows users to create and visualize floor plans. A prerequisite to running this application is Adobe Flash – it is recommended that you have Adobe Flash 9 or newer.

Buying a new home, moving into a new office, planning an extension to your house or just want to give your living room a make-over. Floorplanner offers and easy way to create and share interactive floor plans with others. You can see whether your furniture fits well, plan and visualize new kitchen design with the contractor, etc. Although the application is quite easy to use it requires some familiarity with the concept.

You start with a set of measuring tools that allow you to specify the area your floors cover and what color and material floors will be made of. It is also possible to build walls with custom thickness and height. Next you can add different types of doors and windows.

Once all the framework is complete, Floorplanner gives you the option of visualizing your room/house filled with the furniture of your choice. With a growing collection of furniture of different sizes, shapes and colors, users can find, if not the exact one, furniture that will pass as reasonable imitations of furniture they have now, or plan on purchasing.

Some other features include camera pan, which allows you to build as big of a house as you can dream of. It includes props such as cars (for your garage) and bushes for the garden. You are also allowed the capability to create sand and grass turfs to simulate your front or back yard.

Finally, with an extra cost, it is possible to view the plans in 3D and even advertise them (good if you’re in the real estate business). The service itself, at the most basic level is free. The free version is limited to 5 floor plans, the option to share the plans with others, embed ready plans on other websites, and all furniture and floor planning features.

SeeMyDesign

SeeMyDesign is an alternative to Floorplanner, but with a focus on interior design. The idea behind the service is to provide designers with a simple solution to test and preview room designs and later share it with others (clients) to get feedback.

One of the noteworthy functionalities is ability to decorate and preview living rooms with some different furniture and wall colors. The only problem there is a rather limited variety of furniture (couches, chairs, etc.) so it’s not very effective. However one good reason to use it is the wall color selector features which makes it easy to see how different wall colors go with furniture.

SeeMyDesign also provides is an overall cost calculator. This nifty feature helps you calculate the cost for each material (i.e. paint), furniture, windows and doors and get the total cost. It will determine a total cost for your house decor and email it to the provided address.

MyDeco

Mydeco is a web-based room planner that lets you recreate your room and furnish it in a 3D environment. The cool thing about it, it lets interact with almost every aspect: change colors, add wallpapers, try furniture etc. You can visualize changes from any angle you want. And the best part of all it can recreate your room directly from the pictures.

I spent 20-30 minutes just playing around with the room designer and some of the features are quite impressive. There is a draggable camera that shows you a first-person view in a small window. In addition to using the camera, you can also change the “height” of the camera (i.e. ground-level, adjacent to the ceiling, or any of the other heights in between) and it’s also possible to change whether the camera is looking down, eye-level or up.

What’s amazing about MyDeco is that it is totally free. The furniture selection is immense and on the side it shows you how much money you are currently spending. The only set-back is that the money is in euros, and the furniture is probably also in Europe. In addition to sorting furniture by type, you can also search for furniture by dimension and cost. So say you’re on a $20,000 furniture budget and you’ve almost exceeded $19,000, all you’d have to do is search up all items (in a certain category, i.e. beds) costing $1,000 or less. In the end, you can view a list of all the furniture you’ve included in your design.

(By) Anthony is a high-school student, blogger and a distance runner. In his free time, he enjoys running track, and sifting through the web. Drop by his blog at Radicitus, Dude!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Create a House Floor Plan with FloorPlanner (11)
• 5 Online Resources To Help You Unclutter & Decorate your Home (3)
• 4 Apps To Make Motivational Posters (16)