Work goes on

We had a fairly pleasant day today with bright spells and showers, but the weather’s expected to become more unsettled during the coming week. So no chance that I’ll be able to collect the Savannah, then, meaning that I’ll have no distractions and will be able to concentrate on what is really my main priority, namely the improvement work that I have planned for my house.

I’m still slogging away on the modelling work that I need to do before I can create the necessary plans and drawings and making only slow, but steady, progress. The main reason is that software such as Edificus, which is what I’m using, works on the basic assumption that buildings will be square and that any shapes created during the planning process will be regular. And that’s far from the case with my house.

For a start it’s footprint is more of a trapezium with the wall at its northern end being 0.7 metres shorter than the one at the other. The southern wall is more or less at 90 degrees to the front but the northern wall is at an angle, as I found when I installed the base units in my kitchen. This means that the back wall is also shorter than the front and internal walls and partitions are also at irregular angles.

So I had to start out by taking a large number of external and internal measurements, many of which were quite difficult to get at, and then try to emulate them as closely as possible in my model. I’ve managed to do so pretty well on the whole, but fortunately I’ve succeeded in matching the most important ones quite closely.

I’ve now been working on the roof for several days and keep finding more out about the software as I use it, often having to take a couple of steps back to correct work that I’ve already done. I’ve been discovering a lot about ‘building levels’ this week end, which are highly relevant because these allow you to create and print out plans for the different parts of the building.

If by mistake you include elements from one level in another, the plans that you then create can be a nonsense, and if you need to move items from one level to another (eg from ground floor to roof level), I’ve found no simple way of doing it without then needing several more minutes (often very many for more complex items) to get all of the revised heights back to where they should be, with walls of the correct heights, beam ends at the junctions where they should be, and so on.

So it’s challenging, but a process that I’m getting more control over, in my ham-fisted way, as I proceed. Here are the latest shots of the roof structure, which is quite complex, and the interior.

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I hope that within another one or two days I’ll have the model of my house in its current state finished, with the building sitting as it does in a model of its terrain. And then I’ll be able to go on to work on the improvements that I have in mind. I’ll be very glad to finally get to that point after all the time it’s taken so far.