.

I have quite a bit of experience with "FloorPlan 3D" (500+ hours playing with it) and have, for the most part, been satisfied. It is inexpensive (~$40)and somewhat buggy but I have found workarounds for nearly all the bugs.

Don't think for a minute that you are going to sit down, open up ANY of these programs, and immediately design a house. For me, the learning curve for FP3D, before I could do anything remotely useful, was probably 50 hours.

The version of FP3d I'm using is v10; v11 added a few capabilities and got rid of a few bugs. But the current version now for sale is called "Turbo Floor Plan" and the interface is enough different that I bailed on it after half an hour. No doubt it is every bit as good as the previous versions, but since my v10 does what I need, I felt I didn't need to go through another learning curve. Turbo FloorPlan is available as a fully functional free trial download, good for 30 days. Go here to download it. FP3D also has a very good bbs chat site, similar to this bbs, with very helpful people on it. You'll find it here.

From what I have read, Punch Software's software is considered to be the best of this genre. I purchased it for $170, and after fighting with it for about 10 hours, gave up on it and went back to FP3D. I felt it to be exceptionally complex and unintuitive, but that may well be because I was used to FP3D and expected Punch to do things in a similar fashion, so when my hard-earned tricks and techniques from FP3D didn't work I became disgruntled and blamed the software when the fault may have been mine.

You will not be able to create blueprints suitable for actual construction with this type of program. You WILL be able to work out the design, both interior and exterior, enough to give an architect exactly the idea(s) you have in mind.

tanstaafl.

Edit: I'm attaching a couple of pictures created with FP3D to give you an idea of what the program does.