Sketches

A sketch is a board for arranging a house as rooms on a rectangular plot before drawing exact walls. Rooms are labelled pieces that you move and resize instead of walls. A sketch belongs to you, not to a project: open Sketches from the Projects page to create, open, or delete one. It is not building geometry and never reads or changes a plan.

Start a sketch

New sketch asks for a name and the plot width and depth, for example 30' by 40'. The board draws the plot as a rectangle.

Sketch rooms

Add rooms from the piece rail, then drag them into place. Edit a room by dragging an edge or by typing an exact size, for example +2'; sizes are the room's clear inside size in the project's units. A shared boundary stretch (a seam) moves from either side and reshapes both rooms along that stretch only. Between touching rooms you can walk through, open them into one space, or keep them separate. Doors, windows and ventilators can be placed on the edges the sketch draws, and stairs connect floors.

Undo and redo (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z) work on the whole sketch. The sketch saves automatically after a short pause. Fit lists rooms whose edges are near-aligned or whose openings no longer fit, with a one-click Align.

New project from sketch

New project from sketch creates a new project, writes the sketch's plot, and generates the plan once; the project opens in Plans. After that the plan is ordinary editable Plans geometry: nothing links it back to the sketch, so later sketch edits do not change it and deleting the sketch does not affect it.