House construction

I bought this product this week and overall, I’m very happy with it. I’m an interior designer who already has extended experience with autocad. I’ve also worked with 20/20 for kitchen design and I’m familiar with Google Sketch-up, but haven’t worked with it. I bought it because we’re planning to build a house and I thought this would be a fun way to design our new house. I also thought it would be great to use with clients to show them 3D views of the rooms I would be designing for them. If you’re familiar with autocad, this program is about the same difficulty to use and the tutorials are helpful, but don’t go into too much depth. So far, I’ve found it easy to get started, but there are a lot of small details that you need to experiment with in order to get what you want. The best thing about this program that I’ve found, is it’s ability to draw a 3D picture directly from a floor plan. (From my experience with Sketch-up, that program requires you to build the walls, doors, etc.) This program allows you to put windows and doors in very easily — almost like cut & paste. Because I read quite a few reviews of this product and others, I wasn’t sure if it would be as good as I would like. It’s not professional, of course, but it does enough for my purposes. The only thing that I would like is if it had more furniture styles to choose from, so that if I wanted to use it with clients, I could show them a closer replica of what their room would look like. I have to experiment some more, but for now it only gives me a general idea of what the room would look like. It’s a good planning tool. I’m happy with my choice. I think I got a lot of progam for a relatively small cost. One thing I would like to reiterate is that if you’re not familiar with any other autocad products, you may have difficulty learning to use it.

I’m new to architectural software. I was looking for something to visaulize a remodel of a house we’re about to buy, to see how our furniture would fit, and to viualize artwork on the walls. The house I modeled is a square-ish structure with a daylight basement, dorma, two slab-based additions (screened-in porch and sun room), and a detached garage.

I initially tried […] and paid them $75 to build the basic floorplan for me; however, once I tried to use it, it was a disater. I couldn’t even figure out how to move from floor to floor in blueprint mode and the online help wasn’t very good. Moreover the plans they supplied were wrong: they showed french doors instead of regular windows in the sun room. I e-mailed them about this and got no reply. ($100 wasted)

I then did some more research and downloaded a trial of Home Design Suite 9.0. I very quickly had my floorplan laid out and by the end of the day had most of our furniture installed, artwork containing my photography on the walls, and movies on the plasma tv’s with scenes from my favorite movies.

The only negative thing is that I spent a couple of hours on the trial and got a lot of the floorplan completed, but couldn’t enter the key I’d just purchased and save my work (the trial version cannot save, print, import, export, etc.). So I basically had to do it all over again.

The online help is great and there are a ton of online tutorial videos. I found answers to all my questions except 1 (adding driveways, sidewalks and roads) using the available online resources.

I plan to use it to remodel the kitchen, plan furniture layouts and to draw electrical plans for permits when we finally move.

There is a large tree in the yard of the house we are buying and I tried to find it in the plant library, but none of the trees in there were anything like it. Unfortunately, I know little about trees so I’ve no idea what species it is, but none of the pictures were anything close.

I highly recommend it. For under $100, it’s a great deal.

Mark