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If you've been following us for long you know some months ago we were advised for a number of reasons to move our site about 100 feet uphill, so the original pictures of the site we staked do not show where we now are planning to build.
I don't want to post something else we will not use, but we are far enough along with our house plans to risk sharing them.
For those who just want a simple picture of the plans, here is a view from the front, southeast corner.
This picture was produced with a program called SketchUp which is now a Google product. It is easy to use though it requires a short time to learn its many features.For those readers who would like to understand the plans better you will want to use SketchUp so you can tilt and rotate the plans to see the house from various perspectives. Here is the link for the free SketchUp download http://sketchup.google.com/download/gsu.html.
Currently I am trying a free service called TeraDepot. To access the latest posted version of our plans, refer to the section in the left column near the top labeled "See our latest house plans". When you get to TeraDepot, select the "Free Download" option, enter the security code that will appear, and the file will download.
So, if you download and install SketchUp, and you download the latest version of the plans, you will be able to tilt and turn the 3D view around, hide parts of it to see other parts better (like hiding the outside walls, or the roof,) and even make changes to the plan for your own amusement.
The SketchUp "Tool" that will be most useful is called "Orbit." It appears in the tool bar at the top of the screen as two arrows sort of wrapped around each other, to the left of the "hand" icon. To turn parts of the plan off or on use the "Layers" feature found under the "Windows" pull-down menu.
I hope you take the time to try this out. SketchUp is a lot of fun, and once you install it you can use it for your own projects.
Send a note if you try and have problems along the way.
UPDATE: This post has been modified with new instructions for downloading the house plans. 9/8/09]
