Our Favorite Home Improvement Apps

What I love about apps (iPhone apps in my case) is that there are so many things you never even think of until you enter into some new context, like home repairs. Then you find that there are dozens of apps that have already been written to help you. Here are some of my favorites:

Color Coordinating. Pallets is interesting for finding matching colors to use around the house. My wife has a good eye for this but I’m clueless. It has a feature that you can zoom in on part of a picture and create a color pallet that goes with that. I took a picture of “Wall-E” that my son had taken a few days ago and it served up a nice assortment of yellows. So if I were decorating a room around Wall-E, right away I had some good color choices.  

Paint Matching. Sherman Williams also has a paint matching app called ColorSnap. This app has mixed results since the color of what you’re matching will look different with different lighting situations, but if you have some room for error it matches pretty nicely and tells you exactly which paint to ask for at the Sherman Williams store. Of course it also shows you your nearest store. 

Levels. I use a program called Dual Level for leveling pictures. It works pretty well, but I’ve switched back to a regular level if convenient as it causes far less stress if when it clatters to the ground. 

Carpentry. Of course there are apps with additional carpentry features, including the level, as with iHandy Carpenter. I actually haven’t used this but tried their free level which is part of it, and it’s very slick. The $1.99 version adds a plumb bob to measure the verticality of the wall, and tools to measure the slope of a surface.

Home Depot. Home Depot now offers an app for looking up items online. You can make a list, and either jump to a browser to order or take your list to the store. It also has many helpful "how to" tutorials. I tend to prefer Lowes. I look forward to their app some day. 

Notes. Notes are very important in preparing for any project. I use an app called Simple Note to take notes throughout the day, but especially for notes and measurements on home and gardening projects. It syncs to "the cloud" and can be immediately opened up on my laptop. There I can further edit, or refine my list. I head off to Lowes and open Simple Note again and pick up whatever I need, and I have all my measurements there as well. It’s very “simple” but powerful. 

Materials Calculation. Handyman Sidekick may be a little advanced for many of us weekend project people (it was for me) but it appears to have some great tools for calculating how much of a material you need, including flooring, paint, wallpaper, and many other materials. There are some nice converters in there from yards to feet. 

Gardening. One of our blog readers recommended Garden Buddy to me for gardening. It has a whole variety of calculators, tips, and information. I'm definitely using this next Spring. No more running back into the house and Googling.

Warranty Organization. Here’s a great app with the simple title of Warranty, for keeping track of the warranties of all your appliances, with a master list showing which have expired in red. I plan on starting to use this very soon.

Appliance Parts. Okay, this is not an iPhone app, but I recently found that repairclinic.com was a great place to find parts for appliances, like a replacement bulb for the microwave. I hope they may an iPhone app soon; I’d totally use it.

Other Uses of the iPhone Around the House

I recently upgraded to the iPhone 4 and several of the new features have been quite useful for around the house jobs. 

Better Flashlight. The iPhone 4 came with a real LED flash, which works pretty well. But what I use even more is an app called iRealLight, which simply turns the flash on as a real flashlight. It works great for peering into dark places or getting that screwdriver placed in the hard-to-reach screws. Sure you could just turn on the video camera and there are plenty of free versions, but the 99 cents was worth it to me because this version turns on with no fuss, has no ads, has no extra features to contend with. Most importantly it blacks out the screen. If you need a flashlight, you don’t need the phones LED screen glaring at you. 

Front Facing Camera. I’ve used the front facing camera more for repair than for filming myself. I was trying to figure out why my oven door was not closing properly and put my phone in the oven and filmed the door closing to see if it was jammed. The rear facing camera may have worked okay but I couldn’t get behind it in the oven to position the lens of the camera; problem solved with the front camera. See below. 

(It wasn’t jammed as it turned out, the hinges got bent. Still have to get on that.)

Take Photos! Nothing new here, but whenever I’m working on anything that needs a part, I take a picture of all model numbers on my way to the Sears Parts Store. The iPhone 4 is much improved in this area (from the iPhone 3g) because my last model only had a fixed focused lens and it would not focus up close like the latest model does. The flash also helps a lot in reading data plates in dark areas.

I hope some of those are useful. What apps or other technology do you use around the house?