While apps were traditionally designed mostly to help us solve problems that come up outside our natural habitat, they have proven unbelievably useful tools in our homes as well. It has never been simpler to make your life easier in your house and garden. There's an app for everything — from calculating the amount of material you need to visualizing the flowers in bloom each season so your garden never loses its beauty. In today’s post, we'll take a look at some of the best apps to use in your home and garden, so check them out and get inspired!
iHandy Carpenter features five professional carpenter tools gathered in your smartphone, making half your toolbox redundant. Use a plumb bob to check the verticality of lines and walls or a surface level to level all flat surfaces. A bubble level bar that looks just like a real one will help you keep things straight, and a steel protractor measures angles from 0 to 180 degrees. Probably the most interesting feature of the app is a steel ruler that's able to measure things much longer than the actual phone by using the touch screen (in both inches and centimetres). But be careful with the app — the developers don't advise using iHandy Carpenter to do any serious carpentry or construction jobs unless you calibrate the app first. If you don’t want to pay for the extra tools, you can get a free version of iHandy featuring levels.
Available for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Android.
Cost: $1.99 USD
Benjamin Moore Color Capture App
If you're among the tens of thousands of people who have accidentally painted their room a hideous colour simply because it looked different in the catalogue at the store, you'll surely appreciate this app. Benjamin Moore Color Capture solves all the problems connected to colour picking. The handy app allows you to snap a picture of a colour you like anywhere and match it with an extensive database that includes more than 3,300 paint shades. You can also use the Favorites feature to group colours you've found and create personalized combinations or access a full-spectrum colour wheel with all the possible colours the retailer offers to find which suit your tastes.
Available for iPhone and Android.
Cost: Free
Have you run out of ideas for your home? Then Houzz is the solution for you! CNN praised the app as the "Wikipedia of interior and exterior design," and this praise is certainly not far from the truth. Houzz claims to feature the most extensive database of home design tips available on the web, as it includes more than 1,500,000 high-quality pictures. You can filter your searches by a variety of categories, such as room, style, and location, and save the ideas you like for later. Plus, all users are free to join in the community and discuss their design plans with professionals and enthusiasts using Houzz. The app also offers recommendations that will lead you to local designers and architects as well as the stores you need.
Available for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Android.
Cost: Free
Keeping track of everything you need to do around the house throughout the year as well as actually doing it can be quite a nuisance. Thankfully, the award-winning HomeSavvy app is here to assist us with home maintenance and keep us updated about everything we need to know. To use the app, fill in the information about your house and customize the maintenance schedule. Then wait for the app to tell you what to do. Not only does it remind you about all the seasonal tasks you should see to (such as disconnecting the garden hose before the winter), but the app also recommends preventative strategies that will help you save money in the long term and explains how to do most of the tasks yourself to avoid costly professional help.
Available for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Android.
Cost: Free
Landscaper's Companion App
Landscaper’s Companion is like a huge encyclopedia of plants and vegetables. Gardeners can browse through a collection of more than 25,000 entries and 15,000 pictures specially chosen for the climates of North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. You can learn all the basic information about the plants, including mature heights and widths and needs, so you're not surprised by vegetable prima donnas in your backyard. The app will also assist you in making decisions about what to plant in your garden, as the system allows you to search plants by such criteria as sun exposure, water requirements, hardiness, and zone. Plus, you can find information about the bloom time of your chosen plants, so that your garden is (almost) never left without flowers.
Available for iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Cost: $4.99 USD
If you're someone who struggles to calculate how much mulch and fertilizers you need for your garden or to find out the right time to change your topsoil, Garden Buddy is here to do it all for you. The app analyzes your soil test results (you need to fill them in first) and offers recommendations on how to improve your soil. It also finds the closest gardening suppliers, community gardens, and other places where you can get all the necessary material. After your soil is perfectly balanced, Garden Buddy calculates how many plants you should to sow in the available space. It uses a database of 47 basic vegetable species to advise you when to plant which vegetable, the number of plants you might need to feed your family, and when you can expect the harvest. Growing your own lunch has never been easier.
Available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.
Cost: Free
iScape App
iScape is a fun, user-friendly app praised by both casual and professional gardeners as well as landscape specialists. The cool thing about the app is that you can take a picture of your home and backyard and visualize all the possible changes you could make to avoid disappointment with the outcome. iScape allows you to add various plants, trees, and textures to your property so that you can try out the looks of a garden with extra water features, more lawns, shrubs, gravel, and much more. The app is very simple to use. Just tap once on the feature you wish to know more about and tap twice to add it to your home design. After you’re finished, you can save your creations and compare them to others you make later, send them to friends, or print them out.
Available for iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Cost: $9.99 USD
LeafSnap App
Whenever you walk around the city and see a tree you’d like to have in your garden, you don’t need to worry about not being able to recognize its species anymore. Leafsnap is a unique app developed by a team of researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. The app allows users to identify tree species from photos — simply by comparing their leaves to the species featured in the database, which contains beautiful images of trees (leaves, flowers, petiole, seeds, and bark from the Northeast of the continent). The creators of the app promise to include more species soon. The app is great as a field learning tool for you and your kids, but it can also find its use among non-professionals in landscape design.
Available for iPhone and iPad.
Cost: Free
Are there any other great home and gardening apps you know about? Let us know in the comments and we might add them to the list.
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