raise 3D roof -or- 3Dreams

I can't afford a 3D program and I have wanted one ever since I lost my irretrievable copy of Studiomax in a hard-drive crash nearly a decade ago. (Has it really been that long?)
Since then, It's been like riding a bike, apparently. I discovered Google's free download of Sketchup, a fairly nice and easy-to-use 3D drawing program. I found it in response to my recent interview with the OKC Chamber and the discovery that downtown OKC only has 4 buildings in 3d on Google Earth. One was from Google itself, and the other 3 are from some guy in Austin, which is something I will rectify.
Of course Sketchup is extremely limited, even compared to my 2000 copy of StudioMax. There's no rendering. No lights (except the sun). No bells or whistles. Not even a lathe tool or basic booleans, which seems a little counter-intuitive for a 3D program.
But it was free and in the 24 hours since learning of it's existence and downloading it, I built my house.

It isn't exact-exact, but it's close. I didn't have my blueprints to work from so I had to physically measure with a tape, which took more time than actually building it. Despite Sketchup's for-free shortcomings, it's super fun and just gave me more of an itch to get back into 3D modeling and animation. Guess a big-ol flat-screen HD will have to wait.
In the mean-time, I will begin building downtown with Google's foresighted help to get the public to add to their content, which is our content too. Whether the credit goes to me or to the OKC Chamber is up to them at the moment, as I feel the interview for the position of Interactive Media Manager went very well... but you don't know how well until you know.