Need a good house designing program.

[DARRIN]

Can anyone recommend a good program to design a house floorplan? We are going to be building a log cabin sometime in the next few years and want to start on our floorplans.

 

[Conan]

Most advanced for a good price would be AutoCad Lt. A friend of mine does house designs on the full version of ACAD but ACAD Lt. has all you need for 2-D work and there are a lot of available libraries for designs. It will take a bit of learning if you are a novice.

 

[erniecc]

Autocad Lt is OK, but too expensive for your one time use.

Suggest you go to IMSI site, www.imsi.com, or www.turbocad.com, and look at both their Turbocad program and their house design program. Both are excellent and considerably cheaper then AutoCad.

First download the free 2D versions. These are fully functional but don't contain all functions. there are two reasons for this. 1.) You'll get an idea of how the program works, and 2.) they will probably contact you after several weeks and offer to sell you the full version at a further discounted price.

There is also an international turbocad user group. There you can usually get any questions answered by others who use the program for houseplans on a regular basis. You can find a link on the IMSI site.

Hope this helps. I just went throught the same process and ended up with TurboCad Pro, version 6.5, for about $110 shipped. The standard version is even cheaper, and the house plan program is less than that. All three are fully three dimensional where you can actually walk through the house afterwards and see how things look.