Downtown Luxury Slum

I am slowly learning that people like to take time off for long weekends so it was a pretty relaxing week, finally.

On Saturday, we met with the HUD Consultant. This was a whole thing that we had no clue about. Basically the consultant is responsible for making sure that the contractor’s work is done properly before he gets paid. At the beginning, the HUD consultant puts together his own estimate of what needs to be done and how much it will cost. This portion cost us $1500. Then, three to five times during the renovation, the contractor will request to be paid. The HUD consultant will come out, check the work and if satisfied, the bank will send us a check. If we’re happy with the work, we sign the check over to the contractor. Each time the HUD consultant comes out, we pay him another $250. All these random costs are really starting to add up.

I’ve also started trying to find online tools to help with the floor plan.

The first thing we tried was RoomSketcher. This seemed like the ideal tool for making a floor plan, but I could not for the life of me get it to do what I wanted.

Then, while watching Fixer Upper, I noticed that Joanna uses a program called SketchUp. I discovered that there is a free trial available online. I got started with that and although it was fairly easy to learn, it has a lot of capabilities, and I was not going to quickly learn enough of them for it to really be useful. But while playing around with it, I also learned that there was a way to draw a floor plan on AutoCAD and pull that into SketchUp for further editing.

So I downloaded a free trial of AutoCAD. I actually really enjoyed playing around with this and would like to continue learning how to use it, but again, there’s no way I can learn enough for it to really be useful right now.

So going back to graph paper for now but would love to hear if anyone else has good experiences with any floor plan or design tools.