Home construction is an important time in family history. The personal dream house arises from a project to a beautiful house or is being transformed into your castle, true to your taste. This development or change process is worth documenting, fully and in detail. A Pixum Photo Book as construction documentation helps you remember these often stressful but exciting weeks later again and again and show the photos to friends or your children and even maybe to further generations.

» 1. creative ideas & design tips for your construction diary »

Your house construction diary has enough space for the record of every construction phase, from the start of construction to moving in. Check the following ideas to turn it into a vivid documentary :

• Before & after snaps: If you have renovated an apartment or your own home, we recommend comparing the images from before and after. A picture on the left shows what the house looked like before, on the right you can see the result afterwards.
• Helper: Keep track of who contributed at each stage, for example, friends and family, the architect or employees of the construction company.
• Floor plans: Scan parts of the construction plans, for example, the floor plan of the house or the projects for the interior design.
• Sketches: Where should the wall stand later and which step comes next? Include your own sketches and plans for the rebuilding or renovating in your book.
• Furniture: The first piece of furniture marks the moment of the upcoming moving in - add a photo of it into your photo album as you allow yourself a break from work on your new sofa.
• Funny statistics: Loosen up the topic with funny statistics or a photo, e.g. the total amount of coffee drunk, the total amount of working hours or the length of the distance that all empty drink crates would cover.
• Small details: Create a collage of small details from the architecture, e.g. mailbox, bell sign, the path through the garden, door knobs, etc.
• Kids: Of course, your book should also include your loved ones. It is so nice to remember how the child is stained with paint, how it helps you to get together or how it supports you in renovating.
• Tips: Keep the on valuable learning in your book - perhaps you will need them again later on. And maybe your photo book will serve as a guide to your family and friends planning to move in a new house.

There are a lot of ways you can design your photo book. A possible idea would be to dedicate one double page to each construction stage. On the left side, show smaller photos of the current construction work, for example laying the floor coverings or lifting the roof truss. On the right side, place a photo of your house from the outside so that you can get an overview of the progress of the construction over the course of time at any time as you browse through the book. Here are some more tips for design:

• Start your construction diary during the construction period and maintain it regularly - very few building owners can remember all the details after this exhausting time is over. The best way to do this is to use the mobile Pixum app for smartphones and tablets to keep track of your house construction documentation on the go.
• Don't forget to take an image before starting the construction so that you can make a before-after comparison later.
• Add text on each page telling exactly what was done in this phase - in a few years you may not remember all the details.

The type of photobook that is best for your purpose will depend on how you want to use it:

• If you always want to keep it with you, for example, to select the furniture according to the construction plans, or to show others the construction progress, you should choose the particularly light softcover .
• The hardcover, on the other hand, is the perfect solution for storage in the cupboard, only to browse through it from time to time.
• If you want to share the story of house building with family and friends, have the book printed on premium paper matt or high-quality photo paper. No fingerprints are left on the matt photo paper.
• As a small gift and as a nice souvenir for the helpers in house building you can design photo booklets with backstitch binding.
• With the hardcover book, you have the possibility to use a layflat binding. You can then show every picture of your progress on the dream house on a large scale and without image losses in the middle of the page.
• The large landscape format or the XXL version are best suited since it gives enough space for each lovely details of the façade, the kitchen, the bathroom and the balcony.

1. Select the size and orientation of the photo book and run the editor
2. Select a matching page layout for each page in order to arrange the images (lower left corner > "Page layouts")
3. Insert all photos and edit as you wish
4. To make the story even more vivid, use the backgrounds on a suitable category from the software (lower left corner > "Backgrounds", e.g. category "Textures" with wood grain or bricks)
5. Use cliparts, masks and frames on the topic (e.g. speech bubbles to add text, scrap design elements, yearbook details)