Post 1 – Building a Home

This is my blog post about how awesome and easy building a house in SketchUp was.

David Coleman ’17

The very first thing I did was to go to Google Earth and look at the birds-eye view of my house. I wanted to start with the correct outline and work backwards from there, because my digital sense of scale could use improvement. From there, I built two floors and the more detailed perimeter, then did the front of the house and doors. I basically threw windows on whenever I felt like it – there were a lot of them. I did my best to keep them in line with the ones on adjacent walls if appropriate. (Google.com)

I spent quite a while trying to make the second story more accurate by chopping triangles off the sides of the second story walls to angle the walls, and I am happy with the result. The windows are a rough approximation of what truly exists, with some areas exhibiting more accuracy than others.

One tip that I feel helpful enough to merit sharing is this: Use a real mouse, not a trackpad. I’m at least twice as fast when working with a real mouse, and it’s much more fun to make fast progress.

I had a few difficulties. One of them was a tendency to inadvertently delete or drag around the opposite walls of my house while making changes to the near walls. I did that several times, and it set me back quite a bit. I also just had general difficulty with certain tasks, like getting my camera oriented at the part of the building that I wanted to look at, or trying to line things up enough to satisfy my obsessive tendencies.

I think I especially enjoyed this assignment because it made me remember this home, which is where I lived from birth to age 19. My parents moved after my freshman year at Carleton, but I still have strong emotional connections to the place. Being able to replicate it so easily in software was eye-opening and enjoyable.

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