Some time back (don’t remember exactly when) I was reading my monthly issue of Fine WoodWorking magazine and there was a piece about designing furniture with Google’s free SketchUp 3D modeler. I read the piece with some interest as I’ve been designing woodworking projects in SolidWorks for a long time.
The problem is designing casual woodworking projects in SolidWorks is its akin to taking a Formula 1 race car to get a gallon of milk at the grocery. While it certainly can be done, it’s not the most cost or time efficient methodology out there. Some time back I had casually reviewed SketchUp (I honestly don’t remember which version) and had been underwhelmed. In any event, I downloaded a copy and began investigating.
Spelunking around, I found some on-line tutorials and began to play with SketchUp. It’s a completely different mindset than SolidWorks and nowhere near as powerful, but it was just the thing I was looking for to hash out casual woodworking projects. The neat thing about SketchUp is being free, an amazing user community has sprung up which includes a 3D model depository hosted by Google.
While all this was going on, my wife and I purchased a house in Reston that is definitely a fixer-upper. We knew from the outset that it was going to need a complete kitchen makeover, so I decided to use the opportunity to fold SketchUp into that process. After flailing around with a design for a while that neither Melanie nor I liked as a result of the odd dimensions we had to work with, we got the opportunity to see the kitchen of a neighbor who has a similar floor plan as ours. She had completely transformed the space into a way we hadn’t imagined so we immediately asked her if we could steal the idea (which she admitted wasn’t hers!). Taking the new layout the new ideas and building them into the layout I had been building of the floor space allowed us the opportunity to get a really good feel for the design. We had decided early on to use CraftMaid cabinets in the kitchen and fortunately enough CraftMaid offers 3D AutoCAD models of their cabinets which can be imported directly into SketchUp
Spending a lot of time tweaking the layout resulted in the following:
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Using the basic layout, we got the cabinets ordered from Home Depot, some $15,000 worth, and began demo. Some 4 1/2 months later, this is what the kitchen looks like:
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Which is pretty close! SketchUp is a pretty amazing tool.
One of the things we did was open up the big space in the wall leading to the living room which greatly increased the feel of space in the kitchen. The SketchUp models really gave us a good feel for this.
Some wonderful SketchUp resources are:
- Google of course
- Go-2-School has a great series of on-line tutorials, highly recommended!
- Sketchucation has a plethora of resources including a really great forum section and some add-in Ruby scripts that are mandatory.
The one thing that SketchUp (the free version, at least) doesn’t do is create 3D pdf’s. I got used to having those in SolidWorks and they are really great. But for the price, I can’t complain!