House-planning software for laypersons

[tenniswitch]

Have any of you ever used house-planning software to draw floor plans or plan renovations to your houses in France?  We're about to start some pretty extensive renovations to the kitchen, add bathrooms, etc., and I would like to find some software to use for my sketches.

Any advice, recommendations, warnings?

 

 

[Steve Last]

I have tried many different packages for this purpose and have yet to find one which is any good at all for renovations work. They almost all seem to start from the assumption that you have a "clean sheet of paper” and are going to work in modern materials and have straight lines everywhere. For renovations it seems to me that the essential thing is to be able to start by making a reasonably accurate drawing of your existing buildings and land from which you can then work. Without that you are stuffed.  Short of having a surveyor come in what you have available is generally only a tape measure to work with, measuring distances from a baseline you choose somewhere on the property. The essential requirement to me would be to have a bit of software which would enable me to identify a point by measuring then drawing 2 arcs from the ends of the baseline, the point being where they intersect. Throw away the first 2 arcs and repeat as necessary, then join the intersection points up and voila!  This is an extreemely simple thing for a bit of software to do - unfortunately I have yet to find any which will do it!

The next stage for such a bit of software would enable you to locate say all the walls of a room from the inside,  relate 2 rooms together by say the doorway between them, and the space between must be the existing wall, however thick it is. All the home planning software I have tried however assumes that you are going to build a new wall and therefore know how thick it will be to start with, also of course that it will be made up of straight sections. This is because it is usually North American in origin and the idea of renovating hundreds of years old buildings with stone walls possibly a metre thick, buildings that were originally two or three unrelated structures built at quite different time or even just rock faces doesn’t exits over there

I am certain there is a big market for this kind of thing not only among people like us who have old property to modify but especially with estate agents, most of whom still  can’t provide floor plans except for the most upmarket property simply because it’s too difficult and expensive to create at present.

Having said that I now use a “general purpose” graphics package to produce floor plans and maps for my business which seems to be the best for the job, it is blindingly fast at vector graphics which is the primary requirement here and is makes it easy to use several layers with different levels of transparency so you can do what I described by switching between layers.  It is called Xara Xtreme  (www.xara.com) and is produced by a British company and costs about £50. You can download a fully working version to try out.  None of the other graphics packages (Corel Draw, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Photodraw, Adobe Illustrator etc, work anywhere near as well at this.  If you do try and want me to tell you how I use it in more detail I’d be happy to do so.  Let me know if you find anything else.

Regards

Steve Last