Software recommendation for house planning. Plot, house and rooms

Hello everyone,

since our planned house - despite reductions and additionally agreed own contributions - is still significantly more expensive than planned, we have to pull the emergency brake and start everything over from scratch.
I am currently quite annoyed because we actually had clear financial guidelines. Since May, we have been struggling with various saving measures, which have only been more or less successful each time. We could still finance it, but then we would exceed the set limits and use up our "backup potential."
Yesterday we made the painful decision to throw everything overboard.

So - dear community - thank you for standing in as a sounding board .

Zero point - restart. Now new variants have to be played through.

Certainly we will involve BU again here (if they want to play along after months) - but we also want to exercise our own brainpower and draw up various variants.

Can you recommend a freeware software for this?

It would be useful if we could enter the conditions of the plot and of course draw/plan our house. If the program then also shows the square meter number of the individual rooms, it would be almost perfect.

Thanks for the feedback.
f-pNo

I don't know of any freeware tool, except Sketchup, that really shows exactly what you input. For quick planning, a pen and paper or online tools like Floorplanner or Homedesign 3D are enough. But in my opinion, you don't get truly meaningful plans with them. After our architect finished our plans, I made a 3D model of the house and garden with Stechup... funny little game, wasted 3 days. In the end, it really took just a millimeter of paper on which we drew the furniture.

Do you mean you plan cheaper? How is that supposed to work? You can paint something, but how are you supposed to know if it doesn’t exceed your budget by three times? Then you have a floor plan you like, go to the structural engineer with it, and they tell you: it’s going to be expensive... because of large ceiling spans or something like that. Then you’re just as far as you are now. That’s not a smart idea. Find an architect or contractor you can trust and who sticks to your specifications. I think that’s the only way to make meaningful progress.

I used "Mein Hausplaner" (Freeware) back then to try out what is possible. I think it is good.

@all

Thank you very much for the tips

Do you mean you are planning cheaper? How is that supposed to work?

You can paint something, but how do you know if it doesn’t exceed your budget by three times?

@emer We had (in my opinion) actually developed the suitable plan. We were repeatedly assured that we were within budget – so everything was fine. At some point, a cost calculation was made and suddenly we were significantly over. Even now, despite various savings and reductions, our budget is still exceeded by about 10%. Therefore, we have to pull the emergency brake and part ways with the previous plan. By the way, we trusted our builder, who also employs an architect – actually, we still trust him. Oh – with the current plan, I can’t have another company (get an alternative offer) do calculations either – keyword: intellectual property.

Now we want to start searching for ideas – we have to, so to speak, let go of old (beloved) conventions. We have to take into account the special features of the site. This program is only supposed to serve this purpose – to record the collection of ideas so that I don’t have to start over with every change. When we have one or two ideas, of course, we will then contact the construction company, the architect, etc. for further planning. Here we can also approach one or two additional providers again.

Hello, please calculate where you would end up with your "Altbau" – specifically calculated per cubic meter of built-up space. Then take a program like "Sweet Home 3D" and see if you can achieve something with 10-20% less built-up space than the current plan was. Benchmark values per cubic meter are around 350-500 euros.