Hi there. This is the first weekly report for my June 2024 tilde30 project.
When I outlined this tilde30 project, here is what how I described milestone 1:
m1 - assemble the larger plan
- this will put all the things i want to do in order with a very rough timeline
- details will come later
- i'll probably start working on m2 before m1 is due
Since starting I have tried to maintain a daily practice of working on one or more of the following:
- a roughly-ordered plan broken down into phases
- available here
- not including the plan in this post because I want to use these blog posts to talk about the process
- i have been taking inch-precision measurements of different parts of the property to feed into the SVG design I'm putting together
- a very rough draft of an SVG diagram of my property
Thoughts on the process
I have a hard time self-motivating. It's one of the reasons I joined this tilde30 thing with my online friends. So it's nice to have these milestones to help keep me accountable.
My favorite part so far is reading about xeriscape online and working on the SVG. At the outset of this project I wasn't totally set on SVG and spent a bit of time looking around for suitable cheap CAD software (with a strong preference for open source). I considerd the following:
- qcad
- FreeCAD
- some other various proprietary CADs
I ultimately settled on SVG as the format and Inkscape. "SVG" stands for "Scalable Vector Graphics" and refers to an open standard from the WC3 describing a vector graphics file format. I chose this approach because I have worked with SVG at various levels in the past, usually when drawing technical diagrams in work-related contexts.
One of the challenges I encountered with this choice is in the fact that it's not particularly well-suited for design tasks where the shapes need to correspond more or less to specific real-world physical dimensions.
But for my purposes, I think it's okay for the diagram to be roughly (rather than precisely) accurate. I've also come up with a system that helps me get close to inch precision in the drawing! To do this I set up the following document properties in Inkscape:
- measurement units in MM
- grid 1mm in the document corresponds to 1in in the physical world.
- two different grids
- grid1 with minor lines at 1mm (1in) and major lines at 12mm (1ft)
- grid2 with minor lines transparent and major lines at 120mm (10ft)
With these grids I am able to snap shapes to grid vertices to place shapes representing the house or permanent yard features and later on xeriscaping design elements (eg plants, walkways, etc). It's pretty nifty.
Next Steps
So now I have my rough outline and the beginnings of design documents! The next step is for me to start refining the SVG diagrams and put together a rough outline of how i want my property to look at the end of this overall project.