After several discussions with my wife, we decided on a basic plan for the deck off of the kitchen. It will be about 170 square feet, act as a back entry porch, a place for the gas barbeque grill, perhaps have a small table and a few chairs. When we entertained, people could overflow out of the kitchen onto the deck as needed. In the design phase, I thought it important to have a few basic ideas of how the space would be used.

I started to fool around with my drawings for the deck this morning. I figured I could knock them out pretty quick using AutoDesk, but then I remembered a few months ago reading about Google Sketchup. In case you don’t know, Google is offering a lot of free software on line including a basic set of office programs that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program and all of these are compatible with MS office. Depending on your point of view, this is either really good and a great way to save money, or it is the end of the world. I have heard both view points.

In any case, one of the programs that they offer for free is called Google Sketchup. This one is actually downloaded and installed on your computer. There is also a paid professional version called Sketchup Pro 6. You can download an 8 hour trial version of the pro version, which I did not do. I download the free home version and started playing around with it. If you have any experience with a CAD program such as auto CAD, solid works, etc, it will not take long to figure out how to use this. There is a short tutorial that you can watch.

In about an hour or two I drew this, which is a pretty good representation of the side of our house and the new deck:

As for the deck itself, basically it is at grade, so it is more like a porch than a deck. The concrete footings are 4 feet deep. The addition that sticks out of the back of the house is on a crawl space, not a full foundation. For the building permit, I will change this around to 2D and put all the necessary labels on things.

What is really cool is the orbit tool, that allows you to rotate the image in any way you want to look at if from every angle, even from the inside looking out. There is also something that will allow you to sketch over a picture, but I did not have a good result with that and something that will allow you to integrate you drawing with Google Earth.

Likes and dislikes:

Likes:

1. It’s free!
2. It’s easy to learn and use
3. Seems to use relatively low computer overhead, worked well on my 4 year old laptop
4. Good on line help and documentation
5. Lots of on line collaboration and models available

Dislikes:

1. It does not have a “as drawing dimension tool.” If you are doing a to scale drawing, you have to draw the line, then measure it, then adjust it. It is a bit cumbersome.
2. The rotate and pan tool also seem to make is zoom in. Every once in a while I would find myself unintentionally looking at a very large detail
3. Sometimes the dimension texts are difficult to place properly

All in all a great program for somebody who needs do do some occasional drawings or likes to fool around. I may try the 8 hour trial of the pro version just to see what the differences are.

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