Expert: Paul Jordan - 12/24/2008

Question
First, thanks for taking the time to review my question. This may be way out of scope but I was curious what would be the easiest to work with. I'm wanting to make drawings of my house for my personal use, records, and planning to doccument things like the wiring, pier supports, walls, water lines etc. I've picked up the use alot of things on my own like Windoze, Linux, Photoshop 4-CS, Lightwave, Xara 3-D, CCNA cert (then classes for ccnp)and several others, so if I don't already know it, it probably won't be that tough to learn with a little time and dedication. Thanks again for your time,
Steven

Answer
Well, Autocad has a $4,000 US pricetag on it for starters.  Kind of hard to justify that expense just to keep records of your house.

You might look into some of the freeware cad programs.  One I've just searched on is available at software.progesoft.com and seems to be a lot like Autocad.  There's also a very popular program called Sketchup that I know a lot of architects like to use because of it's simplicity to learn and get lines on a page.

Don't try to buy a "used" copy of Autocad because it's not legal to do.  Autodesk is a multi-billion dollar company with million dollar lawyers that frown on that kind of activity.  Same as running pirated software.  They hunt that with a passion.  

Just go with something like the Sketchup or progesoft and you should do fine.

Happy Holidays,

Paul