Design Your Own Tiny House Using Sketchup

by LaMar Solarcabin

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Intro: Design Your Own Tiny House Using Sketchup

This is a series of 5 videos that will teach you how to design any small or large structure that could be used for a house, workshop, shed, house-on-wheels or other purpose.

The program used is Sketchup version 8 which is free to download here: http://www.sketchup.com/download

If you are building a structure or mechanical device it really helps to create a 3D visual model first and use that as your design plans and that allows you to make changes and see problems before wasting money and time in the actual construction process.

I recommend you have Sketchup installed and open as you follow these lessons and pause the video and try each command as you go along. Sketchup is fairly easy to master once you understand the basic commands.

If you enjoy designing stuff Sketchup is an excellent program and with the housebuilder module you can do a framing model so you can see how the structure is constructed and estimate material costs. You can create 3D models to display your designs and even create a walk through or 3D models for games.

I use Sketchup for all my small off-grid house designs and I have many of these house designs on my youtube channel for ideas and plans available on my website.

www.simplesolarhomesteading.com

www.youtube.com/solarcabin

Please feel free to share this Instructable or video links on your social networks!

-LaMar

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Legal Note: I am not associated with Sketchup and these videos are for education/information purposes.

Simple Solar Homesteading is a Not-For-Profit social and cultural service organization dedicated to producing affordable off-grid housing designs and projects so that everyone everywhere can have a safe and sustainable home. Please share our vision on your facebook, Google+ and other social networks and help us end homelessness and poverty once and for all!

11 Comments

andyholte 7 years ago

Thanks, for these videos LaMar!

Dana LaBerge 7 years ago

It's an apostrophe not a comma, and there are easier ways of doing it, but this is a good set of starter videos even though it doesn't completely apply to the new version.

BevM3 8 years ago

I am seeking a 30' THOW plan + gooseneck, 10'x5'rear slide out sunroom and 2:12 shed roof pic, central front door, tansu stairs to right of door up to bedroom loft, living room on right, galley kitchen to left and full bathroom at left end. For some reason I have been stumped learning Sketchup.

kc8hps 9 years ago

LaMar. I can't get your website to load for days now :(

LaMar Solarcabin 9 years ago

Hi, I just checked and the website link is working. I had that problem a few days ago and it was a problem with Chrome. Try clearing your cache and history. Shut down your browser and internet connection and trying it again. That fixed the problem on my system and it was several websites I visit that were effected.

Let me know if you are still having probs.

LaMar

kc8hps 9 years ago

HI, I just did more research. On my iPad I can not bring up your site in either a private or safari browser. The message I get there is "Server not responding".

On my win7 craptop I used firefox after clearing browser and got the attached image. I tried chrome got nothing. I used I.E. << which I never use and I got the same image as in firefox except the page loaded below it with broken image links. I think something in your server page directory might be saved wrong, or images got moved/saved to a different folder.

kc8hps 9 years ago

HI LaMar,

UGH! First I'm not mad at you. I have done everything on this end and no device works including from a cafe. My suspicion is there is a local comcast co-location server that did not update when you last updated the page. attached is an image of the website you linked to in your post from my end. I obviously made it there but it couldn't see your site from my side of the mountains :(

I wonder what would happen if you were to just move text like one space and re upload your front page and see if it would cause a re-population to take place on the net and then move it back. who knows it might trip a switch so to speak.

Ive been excited to see the plans for your vesport camper. I have a 4x8 trailer I am thinking of converting for such a use. I might have to mod it a bit but it might work with some convincing :)

Peace, Bryan

LaMar Solarcabin 9 years ago

I don't know what to tell you. The website has been checked an no one else has reported problems and I do business from that website everyday. If you are using some kind of ad blocker or have an lsp layered server that could be the problem. I will make a small change to the home page but I doubt that is the problem and it is working fine on other systems. Try using an incognito window or going to the cached page.

kc8hps 9 years ago

I'll double check the things again. I have a 50mb connection here.

Danger is my middle name 9 years ago

Very cool! I know someone who lives in a tiny house in Vermont and has it on wheels so she can move it really easily if she needs to.