Floor plan drawing program?

[Kurt Granroth]

Alan Dayley wrote:
> Is there a program out there for Linux that allows one to draw a home
> or office floor plan?  I don't need CAD quality here, just fairly
> accurate relative sizes of furniture and walls.  Then one could drag
> the furniture around the room to figure out a new layout.  I used to
> do this with a ruler, sissors and graph paper but I'd rather use
> something more virtual.

My first attempt at doing a floor plan was using QCad.  It's free (if
you compile it yourself) and available for Qt and OS X.  It's decently
easy to use.

My goal, at the time, was to get all of my house and yard into QCad
within 1/16" tolerance.  Turns out that my house isn't built to anywhere
*near* those kind of tolerances.  I think I finally accepted 1/2" in
most places.

QCad worked well as long as I was satisfied with a 2-D layout.  I found
myself wanting to deal in 3-D a lot more, though.  Activities like
laying out cabinets and experimenting with door designs and the like all
required building up.  QCad can't really handle 3-D.

AFAIK, there aren't any 3-D CAD programs for Linux.  So I got Sketchup
for OS X and went to town.  That's my tool of choice now.  I have my
entire house in full 3-D in Sketchup and when I want to experiment with
placement of anything (floor based or wall based), I can model it in my
virtual home before spending any time in the physical world.

Sketchup, alas, doesn't work natively in Linux.  Apparently it's in
"silver" status for Wine 1.0 so it might work.  Honestly, I never tried.
 Since my laptop is a Powerbook, it was far too handy to enter all my
measurements directly into Sketchup on the fly rather than writing them
down and bringing them over to my desktop.

Kurt

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