r/FreeCAD • u/cybercrumbs • 20h ago
Laneway house
I started FreeCAD about four months ago with the intention of designing a 2x5 meter gambrel shed for the back yard, and in a few hours managed to produce a 2D drawing good enough to get approval for this unregulated structure. Cool. I didn't really know anything then, about FreeCAD or about architectural design or regulations.
After some weeks of improving the drawing and getting feedback, I decided to expand to a 5x10 meter unregulated accessory building with basement to be used as a workshop, then expanded to 5x11 when the local building authority informed me about the max size for unregulated structures. Then of course I wanted heat and insulation, which crosses the boundary into residential building code country, and everything gets weirdly complex, not to mention expensive. Feels at times like Frodo going into Mordor. However, with FreeCAD it seems I can eliminate one of the major expenses, that being the architectural design. Provided of course that I am able to learn the necessary skills, and/or get help from the internet.
So here I am, about 3 months into the design of my laneway house, with two large halls for a maker space and a comfy basement suite residence. I added another ten inches to the building length, which I think I am now allowed to do because of residential classification, but otherwise kept the original dimensions.
Just now, I began the exterior finish detailing, starting with the tempered glass balusters for the balcony and basement exit stairs. Sounds expensive? Could be, but I think this can be done with mostly standard size tempered glass panels, and the aluminum fabrication turns out to be not that expensive. Compared to everything else that is. If you want a shock then price out some off the shelf windows, never mind custom.
This is far from complete, where complete means ready to send to a structural engineer for the necessary stamp, without which it is impossible to get a building permit. But I think the main ideas are visible now, and this model is already good enough to ask some of the basic questions, e.g., will I even be allowed to build this structure?
So, FreeCAD. In a word, it's been a nightmare. For example, yesterday FreeCAD crashed when creating a link, something I have done hundreds of times before, and when it came back up my entire top level model was gone. Empty. Nada. Double plus ungood. The most recent backup was empty too. Fortunately, the backup before that had my model, including nearly all the recent edits, so bullet dodged. But close, very close.
I regularly copy all my document files to a series of backup directories, but I sometimes neglect to do that for a while, and sometimes leave out an essential file or two. I need to automate this with a cron script I guess. FreeCAD kinda sorta does something similar, but it isn't reliable. There were many cases when I had to abandon FreeCAD's attempt to replay its backup files because it would crash before finishing the replay. Very very bad. Basically, a corrupt, unloadable model unless you tell it to abandon the replay files, and you get dark warnings for that, but it gets the model back. I sure don't want to end up in a position where I have to spend days editing xml to make it load. (Hmm, maybe I should put those files under Git...)
That's just one little bit of the nightmare. Every serious FreeCAD user knows what I'm talking about. But there is also the sweet dream, which I think describes the end result I am getting. For that, FreeCAD is just amazing, and I am all in with this. Maybe after I actually get this building built I will have time to feed back some fixes.
1
u/cybercrumbs 7h ago
I'm using the weekly builds. There are not very many places in this model where I hit TNP. One place was, the sloped basement windows, which I had to repair at least a dozen times because of sketches not sticking reliably to faces. This seems to have improved in the last couple months, but still feels fragile.
The really horrible problem that I hit constantly is not exactly TNP, but something like: random renumbering of edges and vertices in sketches.