Harry's Hardwood Floor Planner

Harry's Hardwood Floor Planner is a toy program that was originally developed by the Dozerfleet founder for the class CITP 150 at Lansing Community College, in the spring semester of 2006.

History
The class, "taught" by Mave Coxon, was issued an assignment to generate this calculator using VB.NET to generate forms that would then be exported as Windows EXE files. In mid-February, this version was released for the class. It was since buried in the archives of Dozerfleet, not to be rediscovered until 2020.

Since the easiest path to get floor textures at the time was from The Sims 2: Homecrafter Plus, floor patterns from The Sims 2 were used for skinning the program. Said other program was credited for the skins, and the form was released as a free toy. Form development credits read internally:

''Graphics Credits: All stone, wood, and carpet textures used were extracted from "The Sims 2: Homecrafter Plus." TS2:HP is a product of Maxis and Electronic Arts. This program and its maker are not affiliated with Maxis or Electronic Arts.''

In late June of 2021, the original form from February of 2006 was re-released to Dozerfleet Labs' official blog.

Mechanics
The user / player enters in the number of floors for a project, the type of wood being used, and the floor dimensions of each room. The program estimates how many nails and glue will also be needed to add those floors to a room. Sales tax (assuming a Michigan 6%) are tackled to the price, and a total sales amount is tallied.

Limitations
The calculator received a poor grade in class. While everything it did worked and worked well, the class "instructor" decided to clarify after-the-fact that she wanted the calculator to be able to have more features, such as:


 * Sales tax that can be re-calculated according to which state the store was in, rather than assume a flat Michigan rate of 6%.
 * The ability to have inputs for any number of floors, rather than be limited to no more than 3 per sale.
 * The ability to have inputs for more than one type of wood being used per floor, and the number of square inches for each type of floor per room.
 * The ability to measure floors in metric as well as imperial units, with an option to measure foot and inch lengths instead of converting all to inches.
 * Etc.

Frustrated, the Dozerfleet founder didn't pursue the calculator project any further.

Remake
A remake of the app as a web trinket with HTML / CSS has been considered, pending sufficient demand and interest. It would use CSS to generate floor textures, eliminating the need for texture resources from files extracted from a video game.