How to Build Restroom Doors in SketchUp Model

Let's begin to build our doors for our model. Let's orbit over to our restrooms on this side, and we're going to build these two doors right here.

So let's go first and draw a rectangle right in this opening. Go to our Rectangle Tool, click this point to this point. We don't need to be inside of our wall group because we don't want this face to be attached to here, so we're going to have it separate.

Now let's Push/Pull this to add some thickness. You want to click and not pull out—pull in. You may not be able to see it if it's through that, but you can go to a certain thickness so that you know it's going in, and type 1.5 for one and a half inches.

I will triple-click this door, right-click, Make Group. Now I will hide this door so I can make some trim for it. So I will right-click, Hide, and now let's make some trim.

We can do the same thing we did before: use the Rectangle Tool on our door opening, and then let's offset the trim four inches. We'll type in four, Enter. Now there are a couple of ways to clean up this bottom trim piece, right? We could draw a line and delete the following pieces, or we can go to our Move Tool and actually move this up, which will delete a lot of those extra edges, saving time. I want to hide my floor so we're not accidentally deleting that, so I'll uncheck the eye for Floor, and now I want to delete this bottom edge.

Learn SketchUp

• Nationally accredited
• Create your own portfolio
• Free student software
• Learn at your convenience
• Authorized Autodesk training center

Learn More

So I will select it and then hit the Delete key, and now I have this trim piece. I want to add some thickness to this trim, so I'll go into my Push/Pull Tool, click this trim, and drag out one. Type one, hit ENTER. Now I will triple-click this trim, right-click, Make Group.

Now I don't need to redraw the interior trim. I can actually copy this group that I just made. I can go into my Move Tool, select Control for copy, select this outside face, and now this is going to be the inside face.

We're going to drag it to this point right here and Point in Group. Now I want to go to Edit > Unhide Last to bring back my door. The final thing that we need to do is add a doorknob to this door. We can see that the door is swinging in this direction, so the doorknob should be over here.

Let's add some guides so we know exactly where to drop this doorknob. I will go to the Tape Measure Tool, making sure that I have my plus sign on to create guides. I will go up 36 inches for the height of the doorknob, and then on the left side of this door, I will click—not this point, I'm going to press Escape—click the line below it to draw a guide in the green axis and type three inches, Enter.

This is the center point of the doorknob that we want to add. To add a doorknob, we'll go to the Components dialog box in the Default Tray right here. Let's close our Tags, close our Styles, and open Components.

We can click this little triangle navigation to go down into Construction. SketchUp has preloaded a lot of simple and clean components that can be used in this model. We want to click Doors > Load Poly.

This will open the 3D Warehouse. You can see that there are a lot of panel doors we can add—other pre-made doors—so instead of having to fully draw a door, you can actually import a door itself. We want to click Doorknob Round and click this little download arrow to load this directly into our SketchUp model.

We'll click Yes and then click right on the intersection to drop it in. When I zoom in, we can see that this doorknob is not perfectly placed on the door panel itself. So what I want to do is edit the actual axes of this component.

You can see that the box is straight; however, the doorknob itself is kind of canted and crooked, and that's an error in SketchUp’s 3D model from their website. So I can edit this component. If I were to double-click this component, I will go in there; however, I'm unable to see the inside very easily due to the actual building walls in the way.

So I can go to this very handy tool: if you go to View > Component Edit > Hide Rest of Model, this will only show the component or the nested group that you're in. If I zoom in here, you can see that this red axis is not parallel to the face of this.

So I want to edit that axis. I can go to my Axis Tool and click the center point. The first step is red, so I want to make sure that I'm going right here. Then I want to go vertically up in the green, and then my blue is forward. Now this looks really good.

If I press Escape, it'll say, “Would you like to update your component axes to match your modified Sketch axes?” Yes, I would. Now if I go back into this, you can see that I now have the axes in the correct location.

I will close this out, and now you can see that this is aligned correctly—but the doorknob is not. So what I want to do is go to Home to see the components that I have loaded into my model. I will delete this and then click this doorknob again and now attach it to the door by hovering over the intersection. Now that should be on there.

Very clean. Let's remove these guides: Edit > Delete Guides. Now let's make a copy of this doorknob to bring it to the inside. So let's go to our Move Tool and click here. You can see that I'm moving.

I want to click Control to make a copy, and along the red axis, somewhere in space, let's click here. There are a few ways to inverse this. We learned in SketchUp 101 that we can use the Scale command, then click on the blue scale handle, bring inward, and type in -1 to make an inverse.

The other way to do it (I will do Control + Z) is by understanding what the model’s component axis is. If I double-click into this component, I can see that the axis is in the blue direction, and I want to make a copy or flip this model about that specific axis. So I can right-click, Flip Along > Component’s Blue, and that'll flip it exactly.

Then I can go into my Move Tool, click the end, and move it along the red axis to On Facing Group. If you're having trouble snapping to that red, you can hover—once you get to red, you can hold down Shift, and it'll lock on that axis you want—and select your doorframe. Now I will orbit around, and I want to make this into a component.

So I will go to my Select Tool and create a selection window to select the doorframe on either side, the door panel, and the two doorknobs. There should be five groups selected. If I go to Entity Info, you can see that I have five components and groups.

I can right-click, and this time we want to make this into a component. Now this gives us options on certain descriptions and names that we can apply to it. Let's call this Door-3068.

This is the common naming convention for doors and windows: 30 stands for three feet zero inches, and 68 stands for six feet eight inches. Now I'll give my door a description of Door 3068.

I will click Glue to: None, and then we will set our component axes. We want to make sure that we match what the model’s component axes are. We can see that we have solid red and solid green—that means the positive direction—and solid blue.

The dashed line means negative. You can see that it automatically places the axis kind of right here, which is on the outside corner of all the surfaces. You can see that the doorknob sticks out a little bit further.

We want to make our axes be right at this hinge point. So make sure that we follow the directions: green, red, green, and then blue. Then let's click Create, and now let's go click our door to make sure that it’s in the same orientation—and it is. Now we could copy this door over—use our Move Tool, Control + Move—or now that it's a component, we can just click our component Door-3068, then click our point right there: Endpoint in Group.

We want this door to be flipped, so we can right-click, Flip Along > Green Axis, knowing that we have the same green axis as our model. Great. Now that we've created our two restroom doors, I will save this file, and I will see you in the next video.