CAD and houseplans.

I am about to build a new house. The architect that I hired to design it is a dud. True he has come up with a pretty good design, which will be easy on the eye (hopefully) and practical. However the design is structurally not very good. Unfortunately I came to realize this only after the plan was passed onto the structural engineer.

It's really all my fault, I know enough about physics, applied math and concrete to have spotted it, but I didn't. That's why I am not a structural engineer! but now that my eyes have been opened, I wanted to try my hand at coming up with my own design. As for the architect, he doesn't want to admit that his structure is unsound.

Well the trouble with my drawing my own plan is that I don't have CAD tool. the limited number available for linux are either too complicated or too limited. Then I came up with a good page on about.com that listed 10 good CAD software. Unfortunately none of them are available for linux. But who cares? I have wine

Unfortunately some of them failed to install and others failed to run (most notably turbo cad). At first I thought this was a shortcoming of wine but found it was a shortcoming of the software in question when I tried the same on a Windows computer. Of the few that remained many were again found to be too complicated or too trivial.

The most impressive of the lot was without a doubt google sketch up. Unfortunately it's a wee bit more complex than I bargained for. The one that is really suited for the task at hand is Fast Plan. But there is a show stopper in that software. They have forgotten to add redo/undo buttons. What a great way to kill a great software.