Floor plan drawing program?

[Alan Dayley]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 11:06 PM, Kurt Granroth
<kurt+plug-discuss at granroth.com> wrote:
> 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.

Interesting and cool!  I have yet to want to spend the time to map it
all out.  (Are CAD design files of your brand new house included with
the purchase these days?  It should.)

> 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.

Fun!

> 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.

I just downloaded and tried Sketchup under WINE.  It runs but one
cannot draw anything.  Maybe it has to do with my WINE settings or
graphics card or whatever.  Anyway, it failed for me.

I'll be using either OpenOffice.org Draw or Kivio, I think.
http://www.thekompany.com/products/kivio/stencils.php3 has Kivio
stencils for purchase and I cannot find anything equivalent for
no-cost or Free yet.  I'll be drawing my own crude representations, I
guess.

Alan