As a professional 35 year draftsman, I would recommend you buy an 11x17 gridded notepad, a pencil, an eraser, and then make numerous sketches. Do an plan view of each floor to create the general arrangement and the room-to-room relationships. Sections will be required at each elevation to show heights. Then sketch each room on its own sheet. Here you can supply more detail, using matchlines, etc. In this manner, you don’t have to bear the burden of drafting and accuracy until you are behind the screen. You can just sketch the idea, and provide the numerics. Sketches need not be pretty or to scale or made by someone with any drafting talent at all. Use placeholders. A square with ‘TLT’ in it is just fine for a toilet. Later, the sketches can be redrawn in cad via a scaled floorplan and your placeholders detailed as required. This is generally how I would proceed when I had to draw up large steel furnaces in which the OEM drawings were lost.
With that in mind, Id suggest paying cash to someone else that has cad software and knows it. This is not a large or even complex project. They can take your sketches and recreate them into a 2d drawing set assuming you did your sketches right. While it will be a great accuracy check, I recommend this just so you don’t have to run CAD on Linux, an endeavor that is sure to cost you that cash in time and frustration alone. It’s just not suited for the heavy throughputs of CAD.
Consider this. If your choice of tools does not matter, you could replace your screwdriver with a butter knife for this renovation. As well you could use a rock in place of a hammer or some eco-friendly hemp string in lieu of your tape measure. If the choice of operating system, the base for all software to run on, is a negligible detail you may as well remove your foundation while you are at it. It’s just going to crack and leak in 200 years or so.
If you don’t know any starving draftsman or doing it yourself is an additional goal, then at least go buy a cheapie beater windows laptop and get a mainstream cad software, even if it’s free. You’ll be needing something mainstream to get good search results as you learn to run it.
And please, if this comes off as rude, I assure you that it’s borne from my first hand experience. CAD drafting is not difficult, but it is tricky. There will be many moments where things can get off the tracks without you realizing it. It’s disheartening to say the least when you realize that many minutes, hours or days ago you punched a bad number, misread something, phone rang and you got distracted, etc. And then when that happens, you have to know how to fix it since some of the drawing is right and some is now wrong, and a wrong drawing isn’t necessarily worth the paper it’s printed on. A good cad guy will avoid most of these traps for you entirely.
As a professional 35 year draftsman, I would recommend you buy an 11x17 gridded notepad, a pencil, an eraser, and then make numerous sketches. Do an plan view of each floor to create the general arrangement and the room-to-room relationships. Sections will be required at each elevation to show heights. Then sketch each room on its own sheet. Here you can supply more detail, using matchlines, etc. In this manner, you don’t have to bear the burden of drafting and accuracy until you are behind the screen. You can just sketch the idea, and provide the numerics. Sketches need not be pretty or to scale or made by someone with any drafting talent at all. Use placeholders. A square with ‘TLT’ in it is just fine for a toilet. Later, the sketches can be redrawn in cad via a scaled floorplan and your placeholders detailed as required. This is generally how I would proceed when I had to draw up large steel furnaces in which the OEM drawings were lost.
With that in mind, Id suggest paying cash to someone else that has cad software and knows it. This is not a large or even complex project. They can take your sketches and recreate them into a 2d drawing set assuming you did your sketches right. While it will be a great accuracy check, I recommend this just so you don’t have to run CAD on Linux, an endeavor that is sure to cost you that cash in time and frustration alone. It’s just not suited for the heavy throughputs of CAD.
Consider this. If your choice of tools does not matter, you could replace your screwdriver with a butter knife for this renovation. As well you could use a rock in place of a hammer or some eco-friendly hemp string in lieu of your tape measure. If the choice of operating system, the base for all software to run on, is a negligible detail you may as well remove your foundation while you are at it. It’s just going to crack and leak in 200 years or so.
If you don’t know any starving draftsman or doing it yourself is an additional goal, then at least go buy a cheapie beater windows laptop and get a mainstream cad software, even if it’s free. You’ll be needing something mainstream to get good search results as you learn to run it.
And please, if this comes off as rude, I assure you that it’s borne from my first hand experience. CAD drafting is not difficult, but it is tricky. There will be many moments where things can get off the tracks without you realizing it. It’s disheartening to say the least when you realize that many minutes, hours or days ago you punched a bad number, misread something, phone rang and you got distracted, etc. And then when that happens, you have to know how to fix it since some of the drawing is right and some is now wrong, and a wrong drawing isn’t necessarily worth the paper it’s printed on. A good cad guy will avoid most of these traps for you entirely.