I hand drew a layout of our farm to give an attempt at a visual of the area. We bought the farm about 2 years ago. The previous owner had a fire in his home and it sadly burnt to the ground. We plan to build the home in the same setting but back into the hill a little to get the walkout basement. The driveway splits into two, a southern and a northern driveway. There is a detached garage that is southwest of the house. I'm thinking the entry into the house from there would either be through the south basement entry or the west side porch. Most often we will park in a parking area on the north side of the house since there won't be stairs to climb. A shed is on the north west side of the house and it has access doors on the west and east. We thought if we did add an attached garage years from now, it would have to be on that north side. The garden and barn are all West of the house. The kids most often are playing to the west, but they do tend to cover a lot of area so it's ideal to have windows out every direction.

froghopper, OP asked about inexpensive software that would allow him to play around with floorplans. He asked for something that would allow him to do basic stuff that he could learn quickly and that would not be too expensive. You commented on the Punch 3000 Architectural program and I have to point out that I did not and would NOT have recommended Punch 3000 to someone looking for something inexpensive and easy to learn. I have even personally recommended against starting out with the Punch top-of-the-line products because they have way too many bells and whistles to be easy to learn. Plus, IMHO their top of the line stuff is too expensive for someone who just wants to play around with floorplans before taking their ideas to an architect. As a TOTAL NOVICE at CAD programs, I found Punch 5-in-1 to be extremely easy to learn and perfectly suited to doing what I wanted to do at that time... which was to play around with floor plans and look at them in 3D so I could get a better idea of what I wanted. I have never used AutoSketch or TurboCad or any other CAD program but if they are really easier for a true novice to use than Punch 5-in-1, then they would pretty much have had to be able to read my mind and draw images without me having to figure out how to input anything at all. LOL! Seriously, 5-in-1 took me less time to learn to use than powerpoint or excel and it was a whole lot more fun. After learning on Punch 5-in-1 and eventually becoming frustrated at my inability to use it to design COMPLEX elements like dormer windows and a very complex roof line, I upgraded to Punch 3000 Architectural. It probably took me several days to figure out how to use most of its features and some I never did bother with - like the "animator" that lets you make 3D video clips touring your design or "estimator" that is supposed to allow you to estimate the cost of a project. I also know that if DH had given me Punch 3000 instead of 5-in-1 to begin with, I probably would have given up in frustration. Punch 3000 was much too complex for me to have learned all at once but having mastered 5-in-1, 3000 was no longer overwhelming. Thus, I was able to use Punch 3000 to design my entire 2 story 3200 sf house... which is definitely not a simple rectangular box! It is a sprawling Victorian home with unexpected nooks and cranies, bay windows, dormer windows, a porch with shed roof that wraps around three sides, a screened side-porch with a deck above it that attaches the house to the garage, two additional upper decks/balconies and a very complex roof. Using Punch, I was able to show the fireplace, all the kitchen cabinetry and bookcases, interior doors with transoms above them, all the plumbing (including floor drains) and even indicate where ceiling fans, lights, switches and electrical outlets would be. I confess to ignoring the HV/AC tab entirely - except to keep in mind that duct chases would be necessary - but it is available if someone wants to use it. I also ignored the landscaping feature as we are trying very hard to leave the native vegetation alone as much as possible and will figure out our landscaping once the house if built. Finally, when it came time to deal with final details like gingerbread for the eaves of the house, I gave up although, supposedly, I could have designed the gingerbread using the 3D custom workshop tool. Frankly, that is one tool that I never did completely master - mostly because it scales everything in feet and when you're designing detail stuff, you usually want to do it in inches. I got tired of constantly having to pull up a calculator and convert inches to feet! I did use 3D workshop at one point to create a colonial porch column and a built-in breakfast nook that I used when trying to show DH - who has zero ability to visualize from a floorplan - what the porch and the breakfast nook would like like once built! When I took my Punch 3000 drawings to an architect to vet, he was amazed at the level of detail I was able to accomplish and ended making only a couple of very minor changes. I have no idea what program he used to create the blueprints but as far as I can see, those have almost no details that were not evident in my original Punch 3000 drawings. I'm not trying to claim that Punch 3000 is better than any of the professional autocad programs or that any professional would even want to use it. I am saying that Punch 5-in-1 is a great and inexpensive program for a non-professional with zero previous CAD experience to use and that a non-professional who starts with 5-in-1 and eventually finds it too limiting is likely to find the top of the line Punch programs will do everything a non-professional could want. All in all, I'll stand by my recommendation - and for $10 to $15 for a used program, I think it would be hard for OP to go wrong.

I spent months looking at floorplans online and also bought a few magazines (often times saw the same ones in both places). I could never find one that was EXACTLY right but after awhile I started printing out the floor plans and cutting various rooms from them and roughly putting them together on a large sheet of paper. For instance, I knew I wanted a certain layout of a master bedroom and when I found it -- or something close -- I'd cut the bedroom from the plan and try to piece it in my own plan. Eventually I had everything pretty much the way I wanted it and then took it to an architect who put it all together. However, right at that time, a newly-built home came up for sale and we ended up buying it and our building plans were no longer needed. (We do have the property for sale where we were originally going to build and we are including the plan to the buyer if they're interested...) I didn't have a computer program to put everything into for a 3D view, but my teenaged daughter had a SIMS game and she would put the layout into her game and we actually got a pretty good view of the house that way! LOL! Now we are building a "carriage house" across the street from our new house. It's a garage with a small house. (We have to build a home because it's zoned for residential and we couldn't build just a garage.) That was so much easier to find a floor plan and we ended up purchasing one online with no changes that worked perfectly for us. Was originally about a 700 sq ft living area but our GC modified the plan with the engineer and added another bedroom where attic space was supposed to be.

For anyone curious, here is a YouTube playlist showing the capabilities of Home Designer Pro ($495). Suite ($99) is very similar and still fully 3D. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqOuoZKrHpQ&list=PL7J4ch5cuz99pBDuLJ5a8Nt6l3DSmTTCW&index=1 I respond to questions at the Home Designer forum and find many people are using the software to build a 3D model of the house. They want to see what many Architects and designers seem unable to provide -- what is the house going to look like? Many people find it difficult to translate a 2D floorplan and elevations into a three dimensional representation of their house. They often want to experiment with colors, place furniture and other objects inside. Some use it to meet HOA requirements, or for small projects where construction document requirements are minimal.