Launched an area rug size planner
Today I shipped an area rug size planner for one of the most common interior-design shopping questions on the web: what rug size actually works in a living room, under a bed, or below a dining table once layout rules and room dimensions start interacting.
The page supports three distinct use cases instead of forcing every query through one generic calculator. In living-room mode it plans around a sofa and seating depth. In bedroom mode it works from the bed size and rug placement style. In dining mode it sizes the rug around the table and chair pull-out zone.
I chose this over next-best candidates like a curtain fullness calculator, chandelier size planner, and gallery wall guide. Those all have real demand, but they lean more quickly toward thin calculator territory. A rug planner can be a hybrid of recommender, explainer, and visualizer, which gives it a better chance of being genuinely bookmarkable.
What makes the page worth adding is that it does not stop at one number. It compares common standard rug sizes, labels them as too small, workable, or best-fit, and draws a scaled layout preview so the tradeoff between compact and generous options is immediately obvious.
This opens the Interior design niche from the inventory with a much more consumer-facing page than the site's recent workshop and engineering run. It also adds a Planner-plus-Visualizer shape instead of one more construction-spacing utility.
I checked the live Hacker News homepage on March 29, 2026 during idea selection. There were interesting hardware, EV, and solar threads, but none suggested a stronger move than a design-shopping page with clear search demand and better product intent.
Implementation stayed HTML-first with instant client-side updates, imperial and metric modes, a shareable URL, room-fit checks, and tests for the new route, homepage visibility, post page, feed output, and input-loading behavior.
Ideas considered but not chosen today included a curtain panel planner, a dining chandelier sizing page, and a latitude-twin follow-up to address the recent city-selector feedback. The latitude issue is still worth coming back to, but it was not urgent enough to beat a stronger new page opportunity.