The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : Help in Turning a ‘Dumpster With Windows’ Into a Dream Home : Real estate: Computer- aided drafting programs can reduce architect fees and allow homeowners to visualize what they want.
It doesn’t take much house hunting in the older sections of Southern California to realize that bad remodeling is second only to botched plastic surgery as a source of aesthetic embarrassment. Among the outrages forever burned in memory: the pentagonal bedroom with no wall wide enough to accommodate the headboard of a bed, the closet converted into a 3-by-10-foot bathroom, the tacked-on interior hallway with clapboard siding and a porch light on one wall, and the house with two master bedrooms--and no living room.
Permanently scarred by these and other house-hunting traumas, my wife and I spent six years mulling over different plans for our Mt. Washington fixer-upper, which had been occupied for years by various members of a rock ‘n’ roll band and looked when we bought it like a Dumpster with windows. I spent the early years drawing and redrawing plans by hand until we finally believed that we were close enough to knowing what we wanted to hire an architect, who spent many more hours--at $55 per--drawing and redrawing plans by hand.
The problem wasn’t so much with our architect as with the nature of the task. Remodeling is a game of inches, and getting everything just right can take a lot of hours. The difficulty was in visualizing the architect’s proposed solutions to the small but vexing problems we faced. Often, we’d agree to one plan only to discover--$400 and another set of plans later--that it created a new conundrum.
Fearing we’d wind up with the ideal plan and no money left to build, I decided to buy a computer-aided drafting program. After trying a couple of low-end programs, including a set of shareware disks that set me back about $7.50, I settled on Drafix CAD for Windows ($495, Foresight Resources Corp., Kansas City, MO; (800) 231-8574). Drafix CAD is a sophisticated but easy-to-use program that allowed me to re-create our floor plan to the precise measurements of the house and then try out different designs.
Using the CAD program let my wife and me calmly discuss various ideas at our convenience, avoiding those sotto voce snarling matches that took place in front of the architect. It still took several weeks to refine our plans to the point where we thought we had all the details just right. Then we were able to return to the architect with drawings in hand and show him exactly what we wanted.
Drawing the plans myself also allowed me to double-check the architect’s measurements. An error in measuring can lead to permit problems if the actual construction doesn’t match plans filed with local building officials. A couple of friends in Mt. Washington had to pay more than $10,000 to have part of their basement excavated and foundations reinforced because of a measuring error by their architect of about 48 inches.
Aside from avoiding such disasters, it’s difficult to estimate how much money we saved by drawing our own plans. Although it probably would have taken $2,000 to $3,000 for the architect to arrive at a similar set of blueprints, I suspect that the mounting financial toll would have pressured us into accepting some things we really didn’t like.
Drafix CAD carries a fairly steep list price, but it’s a versatile program that I’ve also used for elevations, furniture placement plans, landscape design and other purposes. I also use it to draw blueprints and cutting plans for other household projects, where a little extra planning can save a lot of time and money.
For those who don’t require such versatility, cheaper programs focus on a particular type of design, such as floor plans, landscaping and interiors. The retail prices for these programs run about $60 per module (with discounters selling at about half that). But by the time you’ve bought all four modules in Abracadata’s “Design Your Own Home” series (Abracadata Ltd., Eugene, OR; (800) 451-4871), for example, you’re in for about half the price of a full-featured CAD program.
This type of software has some limitations, but it also has some specialized tools that can speed up the design process. Abracadata’s “Architecture” module features a “stud tool” that will show exactly how many studs a wall requires, a big help in estimating construction costs, while Floorplan 3D ($149, Computer Easy International Inc., Tempe, AZ; (602) 829-9614) will lay out stairs for you, calculating tread width and riser height.
Floorplan 3D, which includes objects for interior and landscape design, also has the ability to turn a two-dimensional floor plan into a fully three-dimensional rendering. The 3-D image can be viewed either as a wire-frame drawing, allowing you to see through walls and get a sense of the larger space, or as shaded, surprisingly realistic objects.
The 3-D view can show some aspects of a design that are all but impossible to visualize from a two-dimensional floor plan. We were able to see, for example, how much brighter the lower two floors would be if we built an open stairway, one with treads but no risers, so that light from windows on both landings could filter through.
We were also able to see how opening up a wall into the kitchen would double the sense of interior space, allowing a good 40 feet of eyeball room from the front of the living room to the back of the kitchen.
The limitations of programs in this class mostly affect how easy it is to change what you’ve done. If you move a wall in Floorplan 3D, for example, the only way to resize the floor to fit the room’s new dimensions is to delete it and redraw--not a huge problem until you’ve had to do it a dozen or so times.
These programs also have related modules for estimating a project’s cost. Database information stored with each object in a drawing can be exported easily enough, but neither Abracadata’s Design Estimator ($59 retail) nor Computer Easy’s Estimator Plus ($86) possesses the sophistication of their software siblings.
Both are DOS programs, and neither interface is easy to use. However, Estimator Plus provides a sizable database of objects and associated cost estimates, which can help ensure that nothing significant is overlooked.
For our project, I used a similar feature in Drafix CAD to store cost and other information about objects, then exported the data in a standard file format to a generic database program. This allowed us to set a budget for each of the thousand or so choices, from light fixtures to tile, that have to be made during remodeling.
Without some kind of budget, it’s easy to let the cost of appliances and fixtures get out of control, since every type of product is available today at prices ranging from “Blue Light Special” to Taj Majal.
In the end, the best option for saving money may be to purchase one of the new “virtual reality” design programs and skip the real-life remodeling entirely.
A program like Virtus Walkthrough ($195, Virtus; (919) 467-9700) lets you create an accurate, highly detailed 3-D home design. It’s not a CAD program in the conventional sense, because it can’t produce workable blueprints, but you can walk through your design in “real time.” Walkthrough can also give surfaces the look of brick, marble, tile, grass and two dozen other textures. To a really pie-in-the-sky dream house design, you can even add clouds.
