As a professional 35 year draftsman, I would recommend you buy an 11x17 gridded notepad, a pencil, an eraser, and then make numerous sketches. Do an plan view of each floor to create the general arrangement and the room-to-room relationships. Sections will be required at each elevation to show heights. Then sketch each room on its own sheet. Here you can supply more detail, using matchlines, etc. In this manner, you don’t have to bear the burden of drafting and accuracy until you are behind the screen. You can just sketch the idea, and provide the numerics. Sketches need not be pretty or to scale or made by someone with any drafting talent at all. Use placeholders. A square with ‘TLT’ in it is just fine for a toilet. Later, the sketches can be redrawn in cad via a scaled floorplan and your placeholders detailed as required. This is generally how I would proceed when I had to draw up large steel furnaces in which the OEM drawings were lost.

With that in mind, Id suggest paying cash to someone else that has cad software and knows it. This is not a large or even complex project. They can take your sketches and recreate them into a 2d drawing set assuming you did your sketches right. While it will be a great accuracy check, I recommend this just so you don’t have to run CAD on Linux, an endeavor that is sure to cost you that cash in time and frustration alone. It’s just not suited for the heavy throughputs of CAD.

Consider this. If your choice of tools does not matter, you could replace your screwdriver with a butter knife for this renovation. As well you could use a rock in place of a hammer or some eco-friendly hemp string in lieu of your tape measure. If the choice of operating system, the base for all software to run on, is a negligible detail you may as well remove your foundation while you are at it. It’s just going to crack and leak in 200 years or so.

If you don’t know any starving draftsman or doing it yourself is an additional goal, then at least go buy a cheapie beater windows laptop and get a mainstream cad software, even if it’s free. You’ll be needing something mainstream to get good search results as you learn to run it.

And please, if this comes off as rude, I assure you that it’s borne from my first hand experience. CAD drafting is not difficult, but it is tricky. There will be many moments where things can get off the tracks without you realizing it. It’s disheartening to say the least when you realize that many minutes, hours or days ago you punched a bad number, misread something, phone rang and you got distracted, etc. And then when that happens, you have to know how to fix it since some of the drawing is right and some is now wrong, and a wrong drawing isn’t necessarily worth the paper it’s printed on. A good cad guy will avoid most of these traps for you entirely.

I’m a Death Wish Coffee drinker, nearly black and strong brewed. It pairs well with Dethklok. In fact, I quite often watch it for that first sip. Great start to the day.

Good movie. Well worth the watch.

Wow. So glad these guys are still together. Number 17 on their list of studio albums.

I had just started summer break in middle school. Someone in my neighborhood gave me a bunch of dub cassette tapes. Among them were Metallica - Ride The Lightning and Master Of Puppets. As well, Pantera - Cowboys From Hell and Vulgar Display of Power. Some ACDC, Motley Crue, Ratt, Extreme, Europe. It really was some decent artists to listen to at that time being maybe 10 years old in the eighties for your first lengthy venture into metal. Thanks Denny!

Although I don’t care much for the band now, I think it was Ride The Lightning and Master Of Puppets that made up my mind for me.

Much later works for I, but your friend has excellent taste.

I’ve been into these guys since ‘Scumdogs Of The Universe’. One of my favorite concerts to attend as well. Messy but fun for sure. It’s not for everyone. You really got to have a good sense of humor.

Dog Soldiers (2002) comes to mind, as well as Predator (1987).

Hardcore Henry. A great Action/Sci-Fi. Has a happy ending too.

I have the surfans F20 as well. Good sound quality for sure. It is the best in it’s class for that.

C# with Unity. I sometimes write in VB for its form controls or VB/A for its spreadsheet interface.

I’m pretty good with it. I’ve always hated their syntax too. It’s not natural to my grey matter like a lot of other languages are. I’ll second Lee Mac. I use his numinc.lsp. Very handy. Afralisp is another good site. He does a bit better explaining certain things by example and in much smaller steps.

I can tell you that you get used to reading and writing autolisp after prolonged use. I’ve used it since learning of it around 1996ish on R11. I create lisp files as needed when I notice something being repetitive or time consuming. I currently have around 300 and they are pretty catered to my work as a mechanical designer or refractory designer. Most are very simple and pointed routines that save me a minute and I might use one of them 60 times a day.

However, a more complicated yet far more dynamic alternative exists. I often create .Net front end software programs that in turn create and output a dynamic lisp all based on the user inputs . They do require a bit more effort since they are for a more complex idea. It’s essentially making a vb or c# program that handles a geometry and its range of permutations. It does it’s own calculations and point plotting. It also knows how to write an autolisp script. So run program, input data, calculate, generate script. Then switch to Autocad, run script. Viola! An hour of work in a few seconds.

With that in mind, you can further this even more by chaining that module program and other module programs like it to an assembly type program. Teach the assembly how to determine it’s own plumbing and (presuming its calculatable), it can be programmed to create and send the module programs their inputs directly.

Here’s a video of an old one I did (sorry, no audio). You might find it neat. It’s software I made for counting and creating drawing views for brick dome module. Everything is to scale and is in fact accurate to (8) decimal places. It handled Domes, Cones, Cylinders, and all of the basic 3D geometries.

Not exactly text based, but the old sierra style games are still a blast to play. Leisure Suit Larry, Maniac Mansion, Thimbleweed Park. They sure don’t need many resources to play.

Yeah, Call of Cthulu was my favorite out of most of the tabletop games. You need a good Storyteller, which I was lucky to have once.

I am. First post.

I threw We Butter The Bread With Butter - Fall on my Surfans this week at work. When it played, I was glad I did.