Kitchen firm that can accept CAD drawings?

[Carrerahill]

Been speaking to some kitchen firms about the kitchen, truth be told I will use some of the free design services to get some ideas and basic layouts pulled together then I can proceed with whoever or whatever I want to use.

 

Called one lot up, spoke to their guy, sounded pretty clueless really, and I said, "Can I send you a CAD drawing, are you able to work with those" - his reply, "yes yes we can do that".

 

Perfect, I take our architectural drawings and tweak them to as-built sizes and add a sink block, hob block and some notes to the kitchen designer, spent maybe an hour on it all told.

 

I get a call this morning, "I have got your drawing, that is one we did for a customer the other day, is that what you want" - Hmmmm. I explain that no, he must have the wrong file as I sent "Kitchen.dwg" and that was my kitchen as personally drawn by me. "Oh, right, I am clicking it and it just says I need to save it to disc, it won't open". 

 

I do some questioning and ask can they in fact open CAD files, and has he saved the attachment out of his email onto a disc? "No no, I don't have a disc here - I'd need to do it on the computer, can you send us what is called a PDF file?".  So I told him I could send a PDF file but it would not be of much use as there are no dimensions on it and unless his software can import and scale a PDF I see no benefit. "Oh, but I would need full dimensions" he exclaims, I explain that a CAD file is a fully scaled accurate (well should be) drawing as used by architects and engineers and all sorts, we only dimension things for the end user or construction drawings and it is not common to dim everything. 

 

So, has anyone dealt with a firm who actually use proper drawings? For this I will dim it all up and going forward send them all the DWG, DXF and PDF but I just wonder what sort of software they are using that they cannot at least import the drawings as a background for their design.

[nod]

I installed a Nolte  ( German) kitchen in ours and we ordered from cad

Just did a final measure when I had finished the plastering 

 

Truth is most army interested in drawings They are looking make a sale now not in six months time 

 

We trawled around all the kitchen places for twelve months All the German kitchen suppliers where happy with a pdf drawing 

But like to be millimetre accurate withs Dims As any infills come ready cut with all edges bound 

[ryder72]

In don't know of any kitchen cad software that with read a .DWG. Most companies will be able to scale of a to scale PDF but please don't expect them to use a PDF a2 or larger soft copy to open and get dimensions from. It's too much of an ask for most designs to have that level of IT skills.

 

Further I would question the morality of using someone's time for free. You should expect to pay a competent firm for their time. Alternatively when you get something for free the value of what you get is reflected in the price you pay. Nothing is free.

[joth]

My architect uses Revit 3D but she can make 2D DWG exports, my kitchen designer is an ex architect and said she can work with DWG. 

After a few rounds of "what scale is it" and "no measurements are showing" and other import errors I gave up and requested the architect make a PDF with absolutely every possible internal dimension marked on it. That seems to have been more successful.

 

Without access to all the packages used it's near impossible to debug what was going wrong from my position