QCAD

Using QCAD to Produce a Design Drawing for Home Improvement

I am posting this information with hope that it might help others who are interested in improving their home and looking for a great way to document and move forward with a plan for home improvement. If you find this document useful, then please drop me an email and let me know.

my email: kzahorec@neo.rr.com

my homepage: http://home.roadrunner.com/~zahorec/

Forward

We have been living in our home for several years now. Recently my wife and I have been talking about doing some improvements in the basement. We decided that finishing part of the basement would provide an increase in living space and also provide a great way to relax and spend time with our family and friends.

Providing a detailed drawing:

By creating an accurate drawing we are able to discuss more details and and modify the plan. The drawing is a model that allows you to visualize how the finished project will eventually look. It forces you to deal with many of the details of the project. Once you draw to scale all of the details of the area you are planning to improve you can more easily plan for the obstacles and limitations that you have in the existing area. A detailed drawing gives you confidence in what you are planning to do.

Searching for a CAD software package:

Some CAD software tools are very time consuming to learn. They can also be very expensive, running into the $ thousands for a single user license. The first place I searched for a CAD package was in the package manager on my Ubuntu Linux v8.4 system. I was looking for something that was easy to learn and provided enough power to get the job done. I found QCAD, an open source CAD package which is licensed under the GPL. What a gem this software package turned out to be. It is rock solid and provides all of the functionality I need to produce a quality scale drawing.

Creating the design drawing in QCAD:

The first thing I did in QCAD was to set the default units of measurement and length for the drawing. I set units to inches and length to inches with a precision of 1/2”. You can work in just about any units and precision you'd like of course. I then carefully documented where everything was in the basement. This involved measuring the foundation walls, identifying and drawing all of the ductwork, beams and support posts, plumbing fixtures and service interfaces for plumbing, water, and electrical fixtures. I then drew the design around everything that was already there. It took some time, but allowed me to think through many of the details that may have been missed without going through the drawing, or modeling, process.

Some screen shots:

Below is QCAD up and running with the basement plan opened. You can see that I have created layers in the drawing. Each layer can be made visible or invisible in the drawing. Although the drawing looks complicated, it was actually quite easy to create.

QCAD does a great job at exporting graphics to postscript format. You can easily view the output file in Adobe acrobat or an open source document viewer. Below is an example of the same drawing in print preview ready to be exported to post script or printed directly.

If you would like a copy of my latest QCAD .dxf basement plan, you can download it from my website. It is a text file, so to download it you will have to use your right mouse button to “save link as” below...

basement_plan.dxf

Once you spend some time with QCAD I think you will agree; This is a great tool to have for home improvement planning. It also works great for other 2D CAD applications, such as in drawing mechanical parts for fabrication. Thanks to the folks at RibbonSoft for creating such a useful program. I plan to purchase a copy of the latest paid-for version to help support this effort.

Created using OpenOffice 2.4.1 Ubuntu Linux 8.04.1

kzahorec@neo.rr.com

website require permission from the author. Personal use is acceptable.

Document data 2009-02-28