Chicago Tribune
March 17, 2000

      Though we can find no statistical evidence, we would hazard a guess that nothing can put more strain on a marriage than redecorating a home. Disagreements over decor and the pain of paint choices can be unbearable for any couple.
The answer to this marital malady may be in a new Web site where you can get a virtual view of what your redecorated room might look like before investing an ounce of energy in defending your choice of faux wall finishes.
      The newly launched SeeMyDesign.com (www.seemydesign.com) is a Web site where you can design a living room and see the results on screen in a photograph-type format. Visit the site and you can select flooring, furniture, wallpaper, furnishings and more than 6 million paint colors, and then apply them to the room. Seconds later, the site will post the results in a photograph-quality image.
      Seemydesign.com is the creation of a Salt Lake City resident named Bill Adams, who spends his days toiling away as a computer programmer. The site is a throwback to the old days of the World Wide Web: It's not only free, it was created by a hobbyist who "just wanted to do something cool."
      Adams got the idea when he bought a house three years ago. The home had nice hardwood floors and a kitchen, but everything else needed "serious work," he says. As Adams and his wife, Tracy, began working on the house, they also began having disagreements over design and colors.
"She likes colors, earth tones and textures, and more of a painterly kind of feel, where I'm more into clinical, clean and contemporary," he says. The final straw came when Tracy voted to paint a room in purple and black.
      "I thought it was going to look ridiculous, and I wanted to have a vision of what it would look like," he says. So Adams started developing a computer program that would allow him to create a virtual room and then furnish it, paint it, apply different textures to the walls in 3-D. Over the next two-plus years, he honed the program to make it realistic-looking and to add furnishings and decor elements that could be dropped into the room.
      He's done 99.8 percent of the work on the site himself and, unlike, most other dot-coms, he has no plans for selling goods, nor does he have an initial public stock offering on the horizon. He is offering the technology to retailers that are willing to pay a fee to use it on their Web sites.
      "This has been about learning and a new adventure and what we can do with technology," said Adams. "It's basically edu-tainment--education and entertainment."
      All this edu-tainment has left Adams with precious little time to do other things, like finish rehabbing his house. In the bedroom, for instance, one wall is still unpainted drywall.
      "It's primed," he protests. "I just have more fun playing with the computer than doing the actual work."

      Don Hunt and Brian Edwards write about technology related to buying, renting and fixing homes. They can be reached via e-mail at hitekhome@aol.com, or you can write to them: The High-Tech Home, Chicago Tribune, Your Place section, 435 N. Michigan Ave., 4th Floor, Chicago, IL 60611.