ᐅ Software recommendation for home design: land, house, and rooms

Hello everyone,

since our planned house—despite downsizing and additional agreed-upon self-performed work—is still becoming significantly more expensive than expected, we have to hit the brakes and start over from scratch.
I’m quite frustrated at the moment because we had actually set clear financial limits. Since May, we’ve been trying various cost-saving measures, which have only yielded mixed results. We could still afford it, but we would exceed our set budget limits and use up our “backup potential.”
Yesterday, we made the painful decision to abandon everything.

So—dear community—thanks for being a sounding board .

Reset point—fresh start. Now we need to explore new options.

We will probably engage the building consultant again here (if they are still willing to cooperate after months), but we also want to put our own brains to work and draft different versions ourselves.

Can you recommend any free software for this purpose?

It would be useful if we could input the property’s conditions and of course draw/plan our house. If the program also shows the area in square meters (square feet) of each room, that would be almost perfect.

Thanks for your feedback.
f-pNo

I don’t know of any freeware tool, except SketchUp, that truly represents exactly what you input.
For quick planning, a pen and paper or online tools like Floorplanner or Homedesign 3D are sufficient.

However, in my opinion, these don’t produce really meaningful plans.
After our architect finished our plans, I created a 3D model of the house and garden with SketchUp... a fun pastime, but I wasted 3 days on it.

In the end, all we really needed was a millimeter paper (graph paper) where we drew in the furniture.

Do you think you can plan it more cheaply?
How is that supposed to work?

You might be able to draw something, but how do you know it won’t exceed your budget by three times?

Then you have a floor plan you like, you take it to a structural engineer, and they tell you: this will be very expensive... because of large ceiling spans or something similar.

Then you’re back to where you started.

That’s not a smart approach.

Find an architect or builder you can trust and who will stick to your requirements. I believe that’s the only way to make meaningful progress.

At that time, I used "Mein Hausplaner" (freeware) to try out what was possible. I find it quite good.

@all

Thank you for the tips

emer schrieb:
Do you mean you are planning to build more cheaply?
How is that supposed to work?

You can draft something, but how do you know it won’t exceed your budget by three times?

@emer
In our opinion, we actually had a suitable plan developed for us. We were repeatedly assured that we would stay within budget – so everything seemed fine. Then at some point a cost estimate was created, and suddenly we were well above budget. Even now, despite various savings and downsizing, our budget is still exceeded by about 10%. So we have to pull the plug and move away from the previous plan. By the way, we trusted our builder, who also employs an architect – and we actually still trust him.
Oh, and with the current plan I can’t have another company provide an alternative quote – due to intellectual property concerns.

Now we want to start looking for ideas – we need to let go of some old (beloved) habits, so to speak. We also have to consider the special features of the site. This program is intended only to collect these ideas so I don’t have to start over with every change.
Once we have one or two ideas, we will of course turn to the builder, architect, etc. for further planning. At that point, we can also approach one or two additional contractors.

Hello, please calculate where you would stand with your "old building" – specifically, calculate the cost per cubic meter of enclosed space. Then use a program like "Sweet Home 3D" and see if you can manage to reduce the enclosed volume by 10-20% compared to your current plan. Typical costs per cubic meter are around 350-500 euros.