Software for Kitchen and Bathroom Designers

2D plans and elevations of kitchen designs can look very impressive, but the software to create 3D mock-ups is now cheap and easy to learn. There is a bewildering array to choose from, but the essential questions to ask are:

Is it easy to learn? it needs to be a tool for your business, not a big time consuming learning problem.

Is it compatible with other packages? You may be sent drawings made in various CAD programs and you need to be able to open them, you also need to be able to save to a format that everyone else can read, as well as to PDF to send to clients that don’t have drawing systems on their computer.

Help None of these systems are intuitive and at the beginning you may need some help with relatively simple things that can take up a considerable amount of your time, but one that an expert can explain in a minute over the phone.

What will it cost? Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if you pay more, you necessarily get more. On a weekly basis I see companies running expensive software that they just don’t need. If it’s more complicated than you need, then it will slow you down.

There are a number of bespoke kitchen design packages available, but the snag with them is that they can often be very expensive and very restricted in their functionality, unable to accommodate awkward angles or sizes, also limited in the number of variations of door furniture or lighting. Lastly, because they are not CAD systems, they are unable to link into other packages.

Kitchen and bathroom designers need a system that doesn’t cost the earth, is easy to learn and will link up with other systems and that’s what we provide, with the added bonus of telephone help whenever it’s needed for free.

TurboCAD Deluxe costs just £66. It opens and saves in all the main CAD formats and has all the 2D functionality that you could possibly need, for those with a background in AutoCAD, there is DoubleCAD, it looks like AutoCAD LT, but does more and is about a third of the price. On YouTube there are training films to get you going and there are training books and CDs, as well as training sessions every month. Free telephone support has no limit.

Once the plans are measured out, the next stage is to create a 3D visualization for the client. For this you can use TurboCAD Professional, on the other hand if you don’t have the time to learn 3D CAD, you simply export the drawing into Google SketchUp.

Google SketchUp will ‘grow’ your plans into impressive 3D rooms in no time at all, this can be done by ‘eye’ or by typing in the sizes and it will recognize both Imperial and Metric measurements. Within SketchUp is the 3D Warehouse which is an open source library of hundreds of thousands of objects. So if you want to put a dog in the corner of your kitchen, or a bunch of flowers on a work surface, you open the warehouse, type in what you need and it will offer you hundreds or even thousands of variations on your requirement, then you just click on the one you want and it pops into you drawing. I can show you how to create a walk through film in five minutes, it’s that easy. Impressive paper presentations are again straight forward, with no previous knowledge needed to understand or learn how to put these together.

For further information: 01962 835 081 or http://paulthecad.co.uk