I'm looking for some free floor plan design software

DTDfanBoy

Morning all,
I'm keen to put together a floor plan of our house to help with planning our renovations. Can anyone recommend any good, yet free or very cheap, software. I need the ability to add furniture, and general households items, baths, basins, ovens etc, and resize doors and windows.

I could probably live without the ability to view the plans in 3D, but it would certainly be a bonus if this feature was available.

I'm currently playing around with smartdraw, but being unable to print without a huge watermark across the plans is rather annoying to say the least.

Thanks in advance for any advice

System

pencil and ruler (and squared paper)?!

i've never found a free one that's easy to use and good! you could give google sketchup a try, fairly straight forward, but maybe a bit more complex than you're after for doing standard plans

irnbru_2

DTDfanBoy wrote: »

Morning all,
I'm keen to put together a floor plan of our house to help with planning our renovations. Can anyone recommend any good, yet free or very cheap, software. I need the ability to add furniture, and general households items, baths, basins, ovens etc, and resize doors and windows.

Sweet Home 3D

Syntaxis

You could CAD it up using Draftsight, a free, functionally-equivalent clone of AutoCAD LT. Drawing up and repositioning/resizing walls, doors, windows, partitions, and pretty much anything else is an absolute doddle; the only ballache is the inability to easily represent the vertical plane. I didn't find this too much of a problem in practice, however.

I provide IT support within an engineering company, so I was already reasonably familiar with the interface. If you're new to the CAD scene, the learning curve isn't particularly steep but it'll take an hour or perhaps two to get a handle of the basics. Well worth it for the functionality, in my view, but your mileage may vary, as the saying goes.

As a new user it seems I'm not allowed to post links, but just Google "Draftsight".

Biggles

Try Room Arranger http://www.roomarranger.com/. After 30 days, you get a warning message to register it but can carry on using it as long as you put up with that.

lisal0u

I used AutoCAD to do my plans. It was really easy and you can download a 30 day trial here: http://www.autodesk.co.uk/adsk/servlet/download/item?siteID=452932&id=14837675

I think you can export to pdf too so when the trial expires you can still view your drawings!

DTDfanBoy

Some great programs there folks, many thanks for the suggestions :beer:

kabayiri

I used SweetHome 3D quite a lot recently for our extension and house layout changes.

If you just want a drawing tool "Dia" is more than adequate. I used that for the kitchen design.

Grimbal

hubby used Google Sketch up for our house extension plans (so we could visualise architects drawings). Took a while to learn, a bit fiddly sometimes, but he's produced some amazing drawings !