Drawing Simple Plans Yourself is it possible

SquirrelJ

I am after drawing up a 1 room plan for my loft it is only a simple drawing that needs to be done to scale just so that s structural engineer can work out the loads for the floor.
Is there a free program I could do this with??? Or as anyone any other suggestions???

I am trying to save a little bit of money but might have to bite the bullet and get a pro into to do the drawings but seems a waste for what I imagine 10 minutes work for a pro.

Cheers

tomstickland

I've used Powerpoint to do simple drawings.

steveandel

You won't need to draw it exactly to scale if it is only for the purpose of the structural engineer calculating the floor loads. Just make sure you dimension everything and that should be fine. Therefore a simple line drawing could be knocked up in anything like powerpoint excel etc. basically anything which enables you to draw lines!

superscaper

That's assuming the OP has office.

Inkscape is a good program for vector drawing.

For full 3D modelling, Sketchup is pretty simple to use but that's probably more than what's required here.

As mentioned it may not actually need to be to scale if you simply dimension it properly. I'm an engineer and I've sometimes simply hand drawn things when they're simple, can be much quicker, and then simply sent the scan or faxed that. Not everything has to be done on computer, it's more about making sure the person at the other end gets the right info to work from.

Ivor_Headache

If its only a simple scale plan you need its far easier to just do it yourself on a piece of paper using a ruler. Use a metric ruler and depending on what size your room is going to be, make your own scale up. Technically there are scales used if submitting plans for planning purposes, but if you state clearly on your drawing what scale you have used it should be OK. For example if one of your walls is 3 mts long you could use 10cms per mtr to represent that length. Or if you still work in pound shillings and pence like me, if the wall, or whatever you want to represent is 10ft long, use one inch to represent the ten feet, therefore your line would be 10". Failing that go to B&Q, or Homebase, pick up a kitchen brochure, they usually have a page in it to plan your own 'kitchen' and just use the graph paper in that! A thought has struck me though, if this is for an 'engineer' to work out 'loads' its sounds to me as though you might need building reg. approval!

Hope it helps