So I got a lot of great gifts this year (dvds, Fiestaware, poker stuff, some music), but hands down I think my favorite gift this year is the Punch Professional Home Design Platinum 8.0 that will allow me to work on floorplans for the house we’re going to build in Fort Mill.
For the past few months I’ve been messing around in Photoshop – taking existing stock plans I’ve seen online and manually editing them in Photoshop to fit what we’re looking for. A couple months ago I had decided on a floorplan and even showed my family, thinking it was a done deal.
But then I found another plan – one that truly had a layout that had the potential to incorporate all that we were looking for. One that gave Denis the front porch he’s longing for. One that gave me a first floor library for all my books. One that gave us three kids’ rooms upstairs and a future theater room (which we’ll wire for but won’t actually DO for a few years).
So last night I used the floorplan trace function in Punch and traced in the plans I’ve been working on, and they look quite nice in the program. And MUCH easier to make changes to. I never had to look in the guidebook for help, although I admit that I had messed around last year with a demo version of Chief Architect, which was similar, so I wasn’t using it cold.
Tonight I’ll work on some of the finer details – like figuring out why the first floor is about 6″ too deep at the bottom by the foundation (the furniture all looks like it has been cut off on the bottom). The other detail I’m missing is how to create a ceiling on the first floor and have the two floors connect to each other (right now the second floor hovers above the first floor and is completely visible because of the lack of first floor ceiling).
It’s a FUN program and has helped me tweak the plans I had already done in Photoshop. Maybe next week I’ll post the original floorplan and then my adapted one. The original house was 3820 square feet, and even with my adjustments it is currently holding at about 4200 square feet of living space. A bit larger than we were expecting, but it looks good.
