In their relentless quest for total world domination, Google has recently come out with a free sketching program. I think it is probably the same sketching program they used to create the models of building they have in Google Earth. In fact, you are supposed to be able to create objects with it and then import them into Google Earth.
The software is called
SketchUp, and it's pretty neat. I loaded it on my PC at work yesterday. Played with it for a few minutes, and then got really serious with it at lunch today. They have a neat tutorial that takes five minutes, and teaches you how to use the software pretty effectively.
I haven't exhausted its capabilities yet, but I didn't see any easy way to draw a shape of specific demensions, other than to drag your mouse around and hope you can get the right size by trial and error. Since it's so hard to get precisely dimensioned objects, I think this is mostly just a toy.
It's very user friendly for screwing around though. Here is an image of my house. It's close enough that it really looks a LOT like my house, but it's kind of hard to get the dimensions perfect down to an inch or so. That ultimately ruins the usefulness of this software. I was hoping I could use it for designing woodworking projects. It will still be good for ideas, but not really good enough for making dimensioned drawings.
Enough rambling. Here's the house I made in about one hour or so. This is where I live.