to draw an addition for him. It's a very small addition

since I

used to do carpentry, I said sure why not?

But I thought It would be cool to

record my screen as I was modeling in Sketchup so you can see exactly

each step that I take along the way to setup Sketchup

and really the whole process.

So, what I did is I recorded the whole screen and I'm gonna play it fast forward

for you and just kind of talk you through each step of the way of what I did.

To hopefully help you out in your thought process on how you approach

a similar project.

So the first thing I did was I actually went to his house

and we took some measurements and I just put it on paper.

So I basically took some rough measurements like this

and

you just want to make sure you get

your main widths

and lengths of the house, get a good foot print

but then you also want to get

some heights

and uh...

dimensions for

the rafters uh... the soffit details

things like that. So

the more dimensions that you can capture early on,

the easier it's gonna be

once you bring it into Sketchup.

Alright, so you can see we got a

blank sketchup file opened

and I usually start with a rectangle on the ground

just to give myself a reference point for whatever I'm drawing. So

I'll make the rectangle turn it into a group real quick.

The

calculator you see there I'm just adding up some of the dimensions that I

had written down on the paper.

Just some of the widths of the house I did get some full dimensions so.

And so I start out with a

rectangle

and with the

dimensions of the

the full size of the house

and then using the tape measure tool

I'll make these guides

to

to finish off the shape and then

you could see I'd jump right in with

the

sill plates and

the floor joists

and

sometimes

when you look at those floor joists

you would think that I would use components

for those since they're all the same size

but sometimes I'd find that I catch myself

trying to make a change to one joist

and

unintentionally

it changes all the other ones. I know that you can go to select the

unique

component

just for that one but sometimes it's

pretty easy to forget so

sometimes, I do different things

all the time. Sometimes i'll just use groups

for simple things like studs and why not?

Now this thing i'm building right now is actually like a story pole, so I'm just,

I know what my ceiling height needs to be,

and then I'm adding

my

sheet rock and

furring

and my

ceiling joist height.

So i'm just, I just made that object that way i can reference it now with my

my studs.

And

this was one situation where I

used

groups for all the studs and then I realized, you know what? I wanna make a

component for

for the main stud and I'll label it

the main stud

height.

The way I can use that

throughout the project.

And then once you get this, once you get one wall built,

you make a group out of that,

and then just copy that group over 'cause all your walls are gonna be

different so you don't really want to use a component for that.

So, now I'm adding in my

top plates and

this is why I decided to use a component for the main studs as now I can

make the changes to one of the studs and all the other ones will

make that change as well.

So here

I have

a template just for the rafters.

So you notice I kind of use

these temporary

objects

just to help reference. For the inferencing

system within sketchup it's nice to have other objects that you can

reference off of.

so I'm creating one

rafter

and making components

from that

getting the space and everything

and then I'll group all of them together

and

take that group and make a copy of it turn it inside out for the other side.

And then this is the ridge

and I'll just make the change to the

one of the rafters and all the other ones will change as well.

so I can delete that temporary story pole

and

We have our basic

shape for the,

for the addition.

It's taking shape already.

Actually I lied, this isn't the the actual addition part of the

house. This is an existing part of the house that I wanted to

detail

out. See you can see exactly how the addition

attaches to it.

so I just adding all the ceiling joists

and now I'm adding some

dimensions on the inside

of the

of the house.

So in about one hours time

this is what I came up with.

And

you could see that I'd basically just, I created the outline

of it. I created the outline of the addition

and

some of the main house

and

I'd wanted you to notice how

I structured some of the groups here.

So a lot of the main

components

are grouped together.

So what's nice about that,is you can select it

and hide

the different parts

and you can see I can

go a little further and probably group all these blocks in there as well but,

and then what I did is I

just used

a regular

rectangle and push pulled it up

and

sat down and went over okay where do you want these walls? stuff like that so

it's a great way to visualize layout of walls

and

....

then once we get the final

planned figured out,

I'll go ahead and finish

creating the studs for these walls

and I'll fully detail the electrical, windows, doors, all that stuff

and create a completed

set of construction drawings.

So I hope you've enjoyed this

quick look on

kind of a quick and dirty

way that I've used sketchup.

I know I've made mistakes and what-not along the way but

I wanted to just hit record and see what happened

and just share with you my thought process as I went along so

if you like to learn more about sketchup, don't forget you can always visit my

website at MasterSketchup.com