Zone 0 Mapping with Floorplanner

I wanted to use our place as part of a design exercise on a session on retrofitting, which pushed me into creating some plans of the house at last. These are rough and ready and not totally to scale - this is more of a field map. I'm creating a fake estate agents document, so I wanted something that looks like it came from such a source.

I made these floor plans using the free ("Basic") version of Floorplanner (www.floorplanner.com) which seems to offer an immediacy that SketchUp didn't. At some point I should probably get to grips with SketchUp, but it doesn't seem particularly pressing at the moment.

The floorplans were exported as jpegs (the free version of Floorplanner only allows low res exports) and edited using Photoshop (although a  freeware image editor like Gimp would've worked just as well).

I've been trying to get it to do the garden too, but the export options in the basic version restrict the size too much to be useful:

 You can do slightly better be exporting the plan as an A3 pdf, then cropping out the image as below:

Design: Sustainable Commute Survey Stage 2

Road route is marked by thin blue line, with approximate train route marked by red line followed by tube route in green.

According to: www.distance-calculator.co.uk/distances-for-south_woodham... The approx distance between South Woodham Ferrers and London (oxford Street) in a straight line is 33 miles (53.1km) - while the actual driving distance is 40.6 mi (65.3km) (taking about 1 hour 11 mins in normal conditions).

According to www.nationalrail.co.uk/ a train & tube journey between South Woodham Ferrers train station and London Tottenham Court Road tube station in the morning should take between 1hr 1 min and 1hr 10 min from a scheduled start time. According to www.travelfootprint.org/journey_emissions/ - the train journey between South Woodham Ferrers train station and London Stratford station is 30.2 miles (48.6km) plus a tube journey of 6.4 miles (10.3km) - so a total distance of 36.8 miles (58.9 km).

According to a Personal Travel Factsheet produced by the Department of Transport and based on data from the National Travel Survey (NTS) assets.dft.gov.uk/statistics/series/national-travel-surve... : "The average journey time to work has been steadily increasing; it takes 28 minutes, an increase of 18% on 1995/97 (24 minutes). The average journey to work for London residents takes just over 41 minutes, 48% longer than the national average." While: "On average, commuting trips by foot take 18 minutes, by cycling 22 minutes, by car 24 minutes, by bus 41 minutes, and by surface rail 69 minutes."

According to a 2003 RAC Foundation study reported on by the BBC, the average UK commuter's trip takes 45minutes, while the average distance travelled is 8.7 miles (these 2 facts don't seem to add up though!) news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3085647.stm The journey time was reportedly the longest in Europe.
A subsequent report by the RAC Foundation in 2007 indicated that the average distance travelled remained 8.7 miles, while the commuter travels for 54 minutes a day. One in ten commuters have a daily journey in excess of 2 hours. People working in London have average daily commutes of 86 minutes, almost double the commuting times of other regions. www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/files/theukcommute.pdf