Designing in my mind

In the last couple of months, it seems as if this place has exploded with new members. Which is absolutely fantastic. Congrats to the LogHome Team for pulling this together.

It would seem, after briefly looking through some of the blog posts, that the majority of members own, or are at least in the process of building, their own log homes. As for myself, the reality is that I won't be in the log-home of my dreams for at least the next ten years (waiting for the kids to be out of school). That doesn't stop me from dreaming about it, however.

When trying to go to sleep at night, I have problems slowing my brain down. It jumps from topic to topic and it'll take me a long time to fall asleep. Seeing the clock at single digits, knowing I have a 6am alarm going off, is quite the norm. Recently, when trying to focus on one thing, I've found that 'walking through' my dream home helps me relax. I focus on details, such as materials, furnishing, etc., as well as the general layout. That in turn has led to me to start sketching different designs, which I'm sure many fellow log-home enthusiasts have done. I ended up taking it one step further this morning.

Trolling through my news feeds, I came across Floor Planner, which is an easy, web-based (Flash 9 required) way to create floor plans. It's pretty much drag-n-drop, with the available library containing everything from structures, such as walls, windows and staircases, to furnishings and miscellaneous items such as lamps, plants, cars... even things you wouldn't expect like radiators, Playstations or DJ Turntables. You can spend a lot of time playing with the Floor Planner software. I would suggest doing it at home, and not at work...like I did. ;-)

There's another piece of software that can help in your floor-planning that several people might already be familiar with. It's called SketchUp, from Google. This powerful desktop software does have a bit of a learning curve (it's not drag-n-drop like Floor Planner), but it's an impressive tool. The thing with SketchUp is that you can do a walk-through of your finished layout to see how things flow, you can simulate the time of the day so you can view shadows, and many more features. The best thing about SketchUp is it's Free. There's a Pro version (as with Floor Planner), but I imagine the free version would be more than enough for anyone.

So tonight, I'll be walking through my future log home again, as I fall asleep. This time, I'll hopefully have it as more than just something in my brain.