this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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I'm in need of a CAD program with an easy aproach for someone with zero experience on this type of software.

3D printing is not a concern

I intend to draw the blueprints for my house. The building is old, no blueprints exist for it, and I intend to make renovations to it, so having blueprints to work on to plan the renovations will be a huge help.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Look at QCad. They have a paid ($40), and a free version that is fully functional and open source. It's the most autocad-like app out there, so learning that has the advantage of learning the UI of autocad too.

LibreCad that others suggested was forked from Qcad about 15 years ago and hasn't moved much in terms of features. While QCad has. So in my opinion, it's the best solution.

Then there's Freecad, but that's more about 3D cad, and it's more complicated overall.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Some good ol pen and paper or some kolourpaint

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I could but it would be a hassle to draw from scratch an entire blueprint every time some idea came to us to improve the space. Hence, the digital option.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Was a bit of a joke answer but pen and paper did work for people in the good ol days.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

I took it as a good humoured take ad I answered it in the same fashion.

I could, in fact, draw the entire thing on paper. Technical drawing was taugh to me in school and I took quite well to it; I still like to draw today but more as an artistic expression.

Although I wouldn't consider what I make as artistic under any light.

But my original still holds. Yes, I could. But I would have to make everything from scratch every single time we wanted to try an idea.

Not really practical.

I'm going to look into LibreCAD and FreeCAD. Seem to be the most promising solutions.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

It's not terrible advice tbh, even just hand sketches are solid for getting ideas down, makes it easy to translate to cad. It at least helps me think things through and the like.

Get a few pencils with different leads (some harder stuff like 2-4H and an HB) and some nice paper and you're good, but really anything works, totally have a mockup of my garage on a whiteboard planning where I want to put stuff.

As for cad packages, freecad, as far as I'm aware there are some architecture workbench plugins, and there's a tech drawing workbench. Coming back to cad after a while I found it super easy to pick back up (coming from solidworks at least)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I’m in need of a CAD program with an easy aproach for someone with zero experience on this type of software.

If you have zero experience with CAD, but some experience with programming languages or things like LaTeX, JSON, XML, HTML, etc., I'd suggest giving OpenSCAD a try. While it is definitely for more advanced users, it managed to instantly click with me, in contrast to FreeCAD and others I just couldn't get into (or rather back into, since my AutoCAD lessons back in school >20 years ago). That it allowed me to work work on CAD drawings in Emacs helped too...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

openscad is kind of a bad choice for architectural drawings.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

I think everyone's got the CAD/3D programs covered, so a slightly "out there" answer:

If you're just doing 2D blueprints for yourself, do you actually just need a 2D vector program for doing a scale drawing with measurements?

I've done a lot of floorplans / layouts/ site maps etc using Inkscape, for instance.

It depends on exactly what you're wanting out the other end - so you may be lacking a lot of the features in a full CAD program, but the learning curve is comparatively so shallow that you might have a working plan by the end of the day, rather than the end of the month.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago