Recently things at home have been going great guns on the refurbishment front.
Well. We have been talking about it alot and looking through alot of catalogues to help us redesign the garden and bathroom. Thats about as far as we have got!
Our garden is long and thin (like me) with a shed at one end standing on a patch of concrete laid down as a hard-standing by a previous owner. There is some grass too which impressively measures about 16 by 30 feet, leading off a broken down patio which is as wobbly as my old skateboarding impacted knees.
We had a design in mind which I put down on graph paper and showed to a potential “work man” today for technical approval and then decided to put my geek spin on the project and laid it out using Google SketchUp for the full 3d walkthrough effect.
I have never used SketchUP before and was quite impressed at how quick it was to get something done. I have used CAD and 3d programs in the past, but SketchUp seemed pretty intuitive to use. One of the best parts was when I came to put the Pergola on. There is access to an online repository of pre-created and user submitted models that you can download and insert direct into your sketch called 3D Warehouse. So off I went and typed in pergola, selected the one I wanted and dropped it into the sketch, resized it and plonked it in the right place. Easy! I then did the same for a set of table and chairs too.
The sketch is not finished yet (notice the gaping hole just before the pergola where more patio should be) and is not quite to scale - but it is pretty close to the idea we are after. My “work man” was also kind enough to point us in the direction of a local merchant who stocks over 2000 different types of bricks, so we are off there next weekend to have a look and probably get more confused.
Well, it's not a giant lizard slaying robot and its not a new religion.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Just looking at the image above I can already see that the scale is all wrong!
Those table and chairs are about the right size for a small family of oompa-loompas if the garden is really only about 16feet wide!
LOL - ‘oompa-loompas’!
I usually keep the little SketchUp man in my model just as a visual check on proportions.
Nice model - and very well done for your first SketchUp effort. I wish I had a garden that big that I could model, but I’m stuck with a tiny back yard!
All teh best - Beaty
The chap is there… hiding at the bottom of the garden with the fairies, just behind the shed.
And if I had made it to scale, it might be useful too!
SketchUp is very cool and quite frustrating at the same time. But mostly cool.
Have you imported any captures from Google Earth yet and built onto them - I built a Walton Hall that I re-imported back into Google Earth and now sits in the centre of the Open University campus.
Although it seems you get a better ‘finish’ by just building a box and mapping photos onto it. But where’s the fun in that?
The only thing I hate is where things become “sticky” to other things.
Sometimes it can be a godsend when moving several objects at once, but at other times it is really frustrating!
Like when you select a cube and then move it only to find that the side you could’nt see at the time you selected it is stuck to something else!
Plus the graphics go a bit weird on my Macbook, leaving all sorts of “handles” on the objects.
Odd.. but cool.
I was thinking of downloading Google Earth again and seeing if I could drop my house on the map. Might be interesting!
Most impressive.
But you still can’t beat going out in the garden wih a 30m tape measure and some metal maker pegs, string and a can of spray chalk, to get a real sense of how it will all fit.
You are going to do it all yourself, aren’t you?
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