Free furniture/room layout software?

August 30, 2008 9:27 AM

I'm looking for free OS X or Windows software that will allow me to draw a room and furniture to scale and move things around to find the best layout. Extra points for simplicity and ease of use.
posted by JPDD to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

SketchUp
posted by Science! at 9:33 AM on August 30, 2008

Ikea has something like this.
posted by niles at 9:38 AM on August 30, 2008

Wow, I popped in to suggest SketchUp and IKEA! Floorplanner is also a cool and free one.
posted by nitsuj at 10:20 AM on August 30, 2008 [1 favorite]

planningwiz is another one to check out. it has a database of scalable room elements and furniture, instead of having to draw objects.
posted by puritycontrol at 10:29 AM on August 30, 2008

I have used inkscape for this purpose. It is a vector drawing program, rather than being specifically for floor planning purposes, but I have found it relatively straightforward to draw the shapes of furniture to scale.
posted by timmow at 10:42 AM on August 30, 2008

Seconding sketchup.
posted by iamabot at 11:21 AM on August 30, 2008

Back before the internet had pictures, I used to do this with graphing paper; the lines make it easy to get everything to scale (1 foot = 4 "squares"). Cut out shapes for each piece of furniture and arrange them on another sheet with the room dimensions traced out. You really can't get more simple than that.
posted by bizwank at 11:59 AM on August 30, 2008

OmniGraffle is great for this sort of thing, and it even has some built in furniture illustrations. You can use it for free as long as you put less than 20 things in your room (you have to buy the software if you want more than that in a single file).
posted by teh asset at 12:02 PM on August 30, 2008

I've used Visio for this.
posted by HiddenInput at 2:26 PM on August 30, 2008

Thirding Sketchup - I used it to floorplan our tiny studio flat - the 'Model Finder' function lets you download scale models of a lot of mass-produced furniture (particularly IKEA stuff).
posted by Happy Dave at 1:27 AM on September 1, 2008