apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

SmartDraw is great if you purchase the full version. The trial version won't allow you to print or copy/paste your floorplan without their pesky watermark on 1/4th of the drawing. MS Visio is pretty good too if you have it at the office.

Illustrator is a great program provided you already have it or have acquired it by less than legal means. You can type in the dimensions for basic shapes and mess with the anchor points to create custom angles.

Also, when I was in middle school I used to use appleworks (or MSpaint)...not as glam and refined as other programs, but it gets the job done :)

I'm still rattled by the concept of adults saying they learned computer programs when they were in middle school!

That makes me old.

I was gonna say...nothing wrong with MS Paint!

oh god ... you did NOT just say "hella..."

thank god I no longer live on the west coast.

for home buyers: use the floor plan that your mortgage bank's appraisal company created when assessing your property prior to purchase.

MS Visio also has a floorplan function. You can get a free one-month trial on the MS Office website, or you can use their plug-n-play version (though I don't know if you can save the final file).

The Baker Furniture site has a "Room Designer" feature on their site (for free):
http://baker.kohlerinteriors.com/baker/1_0_0_baker_home.jsp

You can drop Baker Furniture pieces into the floor plan, or choose generic pieces. It also has architectural elements. Super easy to use, and you can save your plans and/or print them.

Cozy up to your favorite architect who can measure your space and crank it out in under an hour :) Oh, and make sure you feed them, or give them some wine.

Google Sketch Up.

I like the Floorplanner tool a lot!

Interior Designers are useful too Katalyst. :)

Who needs a floor plan? I can whip one up!

I use http://roomplanner.icovia.com/lane/

Its free, cute and effective!

Like heather leaf suggested: if you live in an apartment complex, you can probably find the layout of your apartment online. I imported the image of my layout into AutoCAD and drew my furniture in. That's how I rearrange my furniture! :-) Sorry, though, AutoCAD is neither free nor "hella cheap".

clickchick - I was thinking the exact same thing as I read bebetree's post. Hell, when I was in school we weren't allowed to use our calculators.

Thanks for the validation Anne!

computers didn't even show up in school until my jr year of HS. And even then, we had to program it to do anything other than word processing!!!! (I remember one of our assignments was to program it to perform a lottery!!)

When I was a student at NY School of Interior Design we didn't have computers and CAD was only taught as an elective in the 4th year. I'm ancient!

Photoshop, oh how I love thee. Let me count the ways.

#1: a layer for my floorplan, scaled down such that an inch in photoshop equals a foot in my apartment.

#'s 2 through 16: a layer for each piece of furniture, measured (again, 1 inch in photoshop = 1 foot for the furniture).

I created this years ago. When it comes to figuring out if I can fit my stuff into a new apartment, I just measure the walls of the new place and re-create the floorplan in Photoshop (or scan and scale it). Then I can slide my furniture around the screen to figure out the layout.

It's pretty much the same as in college when my equally-geeky then-roommate and I would do this on graph paper with graph-paper cutouts of our furniture to slide around the page. Our system was something like 6 squares on the graph paper = 1 foot.

Roomplanner and Baker use the same software (Icovia).

I guess I shouldn't tell you that photocopiers first showed up in libraries when I was in college in the 1960's...

Google Sketchup is by far the best FREE program for doing this kind of work.

I'm happy to see you mention SmartDraw. It's not freeware but we do give you the full program to test out for free for a week. Another little known fact is that we offer full support even to trial users.

That URL you used is unfortunately a test page so here's a better link to our floorplan specials page:
http://www.smartdraw.com/specials/floorplans.asp

Adobe Illustrator. Get it however, but the advantage here is that it does more than one thing! If you're going to invest time into learning software it should be useful more than once in your life.

http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/

I've got variations of each room separated onto layers, labeled objects within those layers...1 pixel = 1 inch.

Photoshop could work too. But Illustrator is better for working with "vector" shapes.

Free option? Just checked out Google SketchUp...looks pretty awesome for the price. :-)

http://www.google.com/sketchup/

can someone please advise on how to best use google sketchup? I was trying to use it for a floorplan the other day, but I had to draw my own couches, bookcases, etc, and they were hardly recognizable. are there any furniture objects that can be imported or something? thanks!

Clickchick, I'm 19...middleschool wasn't too long ago for me.


Googlesketchup looks pretty fun!

Hummm.... What about drawing one by hand with scale measures? I did that:P

Best way to do it, if your looking to make accurate floor plans on the cheap, is by hand. Buy an architectural scale (probably $2-3 dollars) and some graph paper (any paper will do, but the graph paper will help when it comes to drawing straight lines). The best part about doing it this way is you can cut out the shapes of furniture you've measured and rearrange the pieces on the floor plan quickly to come up with different possibilities.

For those of you who are computer literate, and also don't mind dabbling in a little 3D - Google Sketchup is a FREE program that will allow you to draw floorplans. It also has a library of modern/contemporary furniture you can also play with on your floorplans. For those who would rather not get into the 3D aspect, you can change the view to TOP VIEW and turn OFF the PERSPECTIVE aspect of the camera -- by doing all this, you essentially change the view to a PLAN view.