My New Hobby

I've been appointed the official furniture-buyer. But in a country where there is no Ikea, Home Depot, or even Wal Mart, furniture buying looks a lot more like furniture designing. Every piece of furniture is made from scratch by local workers. When we need a desk, chair, or cabinet, we have two options:
1. Tell the craftsman that we want a cabinet, and then be happy with whatever he creates.
2. Make extremely detailed plans for the craftsman, then prepare ourselves for a final product that falls within a 10-30% deviation from the original plan, depending on the craftsman.

Most of the time we have fairly specific furniture in our head, so we opt for #2 and pray for the best. The result so far has been a desk that you could stand at, a shelving unit that almost fits in the space it was built for, and an elephant-sized cupboard (okay, baby elephant) that we had to turn on its head to move into place. That last one was mostly my fault, though. I didn't measure the doorway.

Anyway, in order to facilitate this process I started tinkering with Sketchup. It's a lot of fun, not to mention practical. It takes me about as long to make a model on the computer as it would with pencil and paper, but the computer version is 3D and accurate to the milimeter.

So here are some of my recent Sketchup projects:

Queen size bed that turns into a bunk bed

Desk with removable computer shelf and a door rather than drawers because drawers stick in rainy season.

 kitchen shelving

 display case with storage underneath

 the aforementioned "baby elephant"