There are so many great features on Houzz, but a lot of them are a hair off.
In take offs, it’s great that we can use the lengths feature to measure items. However, it is only useful the moment that you are measuring since no lengths are displayed next to the line on the plans–only in the measurements side bar. Trying to play the game of clicking on a measurement then figuring out which line it corresponds to on the page is no fun. It’s even less helpful when you download the pdf of the take off because you will see all of the lines on the plans and then numbered lines listed in the measurements but you have no way of knowing what lines they correspond to. I’ve created a work around using the annotations, but you can’t move or adjust the arrow lengths once they’ve been placed and it’s difficult to see where the measurement lines start and stop since there are no end points or x’s marking them.
Is there a way to create an item on the take off with specific dimensions? We’ll do soffit take off where we have very specific sizes of boards that are odd lengths (like 6”x19’) and we like to place rectangles of those sizes on the take offs to show our installers the directions of the boards, the cuts they need to make, and where the trim board needs to go. First, it’s very difficult to make a 6” line and it’s even more difficult to get that box you create to equal 9.5 SF without the box either being too long, short, wide, or narrow. We can never get the boards on the plan to correspond to the correct number of boards that would be used so it’s difficult to give our installers an idea of how many boards to use where (especially when we need to show them where to use the cut offs). I can do this in my on screen take off and it was great because you could very easily count the number of boards you needed to order. I would also love to be able to rotate items I’ve duplicated or have a count function for how many items are on a board. I know the soffit is a very specific example, but If I would 100% use this with tile–especially figuring out exactly how much of a large scale tile I need to fit into a room so I can make sure I have enough overage.
Can we have an option to have the measurements displayed in feet and inches instead of the fraction of feet? It’s so difficult when my CO calls me from the field needing faucet placement and I have to figure out what 7.1 feet translates to and if that number was reached because that’s the actual measurement or if it’s actually 7’1” but the program will only let me measure 7.06 feet or 7.1 feet but not 7.08 feet. I end up having to do some of our tile take offs by hand because we’ll be doing a top, middle, and bottom border with a 3x6 tile but I can’t make a .75” line to figure out how much tile I need (or how much I need to deduct from the other tile if it’s a larger shower and I don’t want a ton of overage). Yes, I realize that’s why you have overage, but being off by a little can mean large differences when you’re tiling an entire wet room.
I would LOVE LOVE LOVE if the background for image edit tool in the mood board was some other color than white. For the most part, the automatic or AI tool is great at editing out the background EXCEPT when that object is white. Example: a bathtub. So when I’m trying to clean up the edges, I can’t tell if I’ve erased something or not because it’s a white object on a white and light grey background. Anything in front of the white square is anyone’s guess as to whether there is a straight edge or you’ve made an accidental gen z squiggle claw foot tub.
Speaking of the AI edit background, would it be possible to the select the area you want it to work on? Sometimes the only head on picture of a faucet is from a promotional photo where I just need the faucet and not the cabinets or the chandelier but the AI doesn’t know what to edit out since there are too many objects to choose from. Or I want the tub and not the faucet attached to it or mirror behind it so I’m left editing the picture by hand with the 7 pt eraser tool. A lasso tool would be the dream, but I understand that photoshop capabilities are a big ask. I’d be happy if it were just the windows me microsoft paint level of a lasso tool.
Regarding the eraser tool–can we have more shape options? It’s maddening to me because a shelf will be at a slight angle but the automatic or AI editing tool is confused by the shadow or highlight of the 3D object (or metallic or glass feature) so won’t crop closely enough. I can’t use the cropping tool to get a straight line to fix the miss because it doesn’t allow me to crop at an angle so I’m left trying to steady my hand, praying for a straight line, but inevitably have little pac man bites taken out of the edge of the object because I’m trying to use a circle to make a square. Or because I’ll be working on an edge and the editor won’t allow me to erase something because the distance between the edge of the object and the edge of the frame is less than the size of the eraser I’m using.
Please, please, please let us zoom in when we’re using the cropping tool. I’ll need to capture a backsplash or tile pattern that is miraculously in a perfect square but can’t tell whether I’ve cropped to the grout or to the middle of a tile because of where it lies in the picture and how zoomed out it is. I’m left guessing and am then forced to edit the very straight edges with the circle brush of doom that makes my eye twitch.
It would be great if there were more category filters on the items panel of the mood boards. I’ve created a bank of items that I’ll use across several houses, but the only way to filter them currently is by category. So if I’m looking for a specific blue tile from another project but can’t remember the name, the only way to search for that tile is by the hunting through all of the tile. Which is SO much better than having to sift through everything I’ve ever clipped, but I also clip a lot of tile. Once I add it to the board, there’s no way to then directly add it to the selection board either. Which wouldn’t be so horrible if there was a way to view the name of the item in its entirety. The name currently cuts off at a certain number of characters, so if I added a Currey and Company sconce that I clipped from Ferguson’s website, the only clue I have to its name is Currey and Company Cha–which is not the easiest search to do on Ferguson’s website to try to figure out what sconce we actually want to use. I’ve tried taking out the brand name from the title, but there are a lot of companies who use the same name so my Ferguson search will pull up Baker ovens instead of a Baker chandelier. Having an active link to the product would be nice, but being able to a)add it directly to the selections board and b) view the product information directly in the mood boards would be nicer (like you can on the selections board)–especially since the size of the sconce or tile is often what is cut off from the title. I don’t want to have the 36” sconce on the mood board when the the 19” is the one in the budget, you know?
Another great functionality would be to have the option to remove items from the “In Mood Board” Section. I’ll sometimes create several slides for one room because a client doesn’t know what plumbing fixture finish or tile color they want to use. Or I’ll have different options for myself so I can determine what cabinet pull looks best with a faucet. But then I’ll have dozens of items under the “In Kitchen” section, and can’t really tell exactly what is in there or easily find it in the list. Which gets really difficult when you’re talking about sinks or figuring out which size of the pendant you used.
It would be really wonderful if we could go back and edit information on the items that we’ve clipped. There have been so many times where an incorrect category populated and I didn’t catch it or a category wasn’t chosen at all and I can never find that item again if I’d like to use it for another project. Or I can’t tell if what is pictured is the Paperwhite or the Cotton tile color so want to include it in the title of the tile. It would also be great if we could delete duplicates.
I also wish we could go back to when we could choose which categories we wanted to have listed in the clipper (ie the OG ones that we created). There was an update that pulled in literally every category from our budgets, invoices, and estimates which makes the scroll feature moot and unmanageable. It even makes it difficult to type the category and select from the drop down because sometimes the drop down will fall below your screen and the browser won’t let you scroll down the page because it’s trying to scroll down the category menu. the “create new category” line is covering up the actual category so you can’t tell if your choosing Mirrors or Mirror and Shower Glass. Another example of an issue this creates is I’ll be clipping tile from Tile Bar and the AI will sometimes pull “Tile” for the category, but will occasionally pull “Tile Installation” as the category. First, I will never need Tile Installation as a clipper category so it makes zero sense to even have this as an option. Second, the error is really easy to miss on my end because it will populate Tile correctly for 6 tiles in a row, but then incorrectly on the 7th, but correctly on the 8th–which is enough in a row for me to forget to check. I’ll then go back to my mood board a week later and decide I’ll want to pull the trim tile I was going to use in Bath 3 to the Bath 4 mood board, filter by tile since several things have been added since then, and be unable to find it because it’s not in the correct category.
I wish there was also an easier way to add photos I’ve taken from the 3D render to my mood boards. The only way to do it currently is to download the picture to my computer and then reupload it to the mood board. When I try to add something from the 3D Floorplans tab, it only allows the full plan to be added. Not even the 3D render of the full plan–just the 2D plan.
Oh! And can we have functionality to rotate something 90 or 180 degrees? I’ll be doing tile layouts and need to rotate a horizontal tile picture to a vertical one and sometimes the program will only allow me to rotate 87 degrees and then jump to 91 degrees–which makes a huge difference when you’re trying to make a vertical offset pattern and these tile layouts are what your installers are using for how the final product should look.
Also–love the snap to guides, I just wish they were a little smarter with what they snapped to. I’ll be doing a tile layout and the tile that I just duplicated will try to align to the faucet on the other end of the page instead of the literal twin I’m matching it next to. I’ll be doing a row of 10 tiles that will be perfectly straight and then the 11th is trying to align to a showerhead that I’ve moved off the board while I’m trying to get the tile pattern set. Or I’ll try placing an item in the corner of the page and the snap guide won’t snap to the left edge, bottom edge, or either edge of the slide because it’s trying to snap the top of the item to the bottom of the vanity I have on the right side of the page. I’ll end up putting something that needs to be seen out of frame (like text) because I’ll have a diamond shaped tile or a picture that’s a block of tiles that goes off slide and I hadn’t edited so that it stays within frame because it’s too time consuming to crop because I have no grid lines on either the page or the cropping tool so I have to eyeball it. Sometimes, I won’t even be aware that it’s far off the page so will put text on top of it and then only the top half of the text will be on the slide when the client sees it. Sorry. That was a big run on that I hope makes sense but I fear the point might have slipped off the edge of that sentence, much like my items do when I don’t realize they’re off the page.
I am SO happy we have justification and font options for the text boxes on the mood boards, but would love to see a background color option for text boxes. Sometimes I’ll clip a photo of cabinetry so it will show both uppers and lowers and then fill the slide so that the client can see the details. There won’t be a clear space to put text if I need to add notes like “these will be paint and not stain grade” etc, but that information needs to be on the slide. Or the main colors of the photo are too dark to use a black font, too light to use a white font, and using a red or blue font looks to jarring or somehow blends in. It would be great to just put a white box with text in front of it so no one has to get Lasik to read my notes.
Can we select the default font for our slides? I’ll have the same font on every slide but whenever I go back and need to add a text box, the system defaults to Abril Fatface 36. I realize I can just duplicate a text box and edit the text, but that’s a lot of workaround for something that could be easy. It would be nice if we could default for everything or at least an entire project. Or if I could update all of the fonts on the page at once. It used to be that we could only use Arial but then Arial was taken away so there was a different font that was subbed in but now Arial is back so I’ll have projects that will accidentally have 3-4 fonts on their slides and I won’t notice until I print everything out together and it creates more work than it needs to.
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