This was my second time using SketchUp. The first time I used the tool I was a middle schooler with few digital skills and so I remember the program being a lot more difficult to navigate than it actually was. Using SketchUp to create my childhood home wasn’t very challenging for me, although I do think it would have been more challenging had I payed more attention to the details of my house. My real house doesn’t have very many interesting details though, at least not externally, so I generally think I did the building justice with my SketchUp model.
I struggled most with making sure that the elements I added to the house were consistent. I had trouble copying and pasting windows, and also making sure that the depth of the window frames were mostly the same. I think the solution to this challenge would have been to do more research about which SketchUp tools to use in these situations, and also just to be more patient. I think I made too many compromises in my design instead of working a bit harder to make a cleaner model.
My house could be humanistically interesting to people studying how the architecture of Santa Monica, CA was influenced by WWII. The Santa Monica Municipal Airport, which now operates as a small airport for private planes, was originally built as part of an airplane factory by the Douglas Aircraft Company. The Douglas Aircraft Company made a bunch of planes during WWII, and many of the houses in Santa Monica including mine were built around the 1930’s and 40’s to house the Douglas Aircraft Company’s workers. This also explains why my house looks kind of boring.
If you’re a novice SketchUp user like me, I recommend that you learn to use SketchUp’s keyboard shortcuts. This really helped me out!
