I have been doing more and more woodworking ever since we moved into our new house. It started with me installing trim everywhere: crown molding, baseboards, chair rails, door and window casings, etc. But as my skills and confidence grow (and as my wife has discovered that the stuff I build looks good), I've been doing some more ambitious projects, like renovating our fireplace and installing wall frames.

So now that most of the trim carpentry is finished on the house, I have time to do some of the furniture projects that I've been wanting to do. My first project is a bookshelf for my daughter's room. When I did the fireplace surround, I sketched the design out on graph paper, but the tedious and time-consuming tasks of keeping the lines straight and to scale, erasing lines when I needed to re-scale some components, etc. quickly convinced me that I needed to do this on the computer. So for the bookshelf, I decided to give Google Sketchup a try. I had briefly played with AutoCAD, but the learning curve was daunting; Sketchup turned out to be much simpler to learn, and in one evening I cranked this out (.skp file is here if anyone wants it).

Creating the model has already paid off: it prevented me from making a couple of design errors that I would have made in a pencil/paper sketch. It also made it easy to experiment with different proportions for the shelves, and I was able to put scale models of people next to the model to give some perspective. I also plan to add some dimension information to the model so I can print out a nice reference sheet for use in the shop. I've even seen some people on various woodworking forums discuss the possibility of exporting Sketchup models into CutList, which seems interesting for larger-scale projects.

So far, I am very pleased with Sketchup as a design tool for woodworking purposes. I will definitely use it for my next project.