Working on the plan

So been using Live Interior to get a feels for what the draftsman drew up. It became apparant in the beginning that talking to an architect was NOT going to be "in budget" (oh didn't I mention that before? You need a budget even BEFORE you start building a house! That is, how much you can borrow etc.) Thank god we got a draftsman who is passionate about design and so we didn't need to go through an achitect who, ineveitably, would have charged 10% (yes that's right 10%) on the cost of the house as his fee!

Whoa!

So using Live Interior helps with spacial obsevation, how close a door is to another door etc as well as the all important walkthrough that shows HOW one would access certain parts of the house, as well as the all important lighting and furniture placement. If you have the budget, invest in Live Interior or some other sort of simple 3D program (I use LIve Interior becasue the learning curve is VERY low!)

Then there's the initegration with Google Sketch Up where you can add the roof (the learning curves a BIT steep but once you've got the hang of it you can download elements from Google Warehouse, and put stuff around the house. Why?

. . . because of the next step, once you've done that you can THEN import it into Google Earth! Then if you have the EXACT coordinates of the space, you can PLACE the image of the house onto the property and get a feel for sun movements and terrain (to a point) and so on. You can even stand up next to the house and look around!

Who says technology can't help?

To use Sketch Up with Google Earth see these instructions:

http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=36241