Hay Shazza, it's excellent to see you trying new things, it's become a bit of a trend in this work log of yours.

Instead of writting you a short story I will try to just leave it as a memo.

The Key to Sketchup is working in Layers.
That way you can name parts, allocate a layer then turn it on or off if its in the way when working on something near by.

The best thing I ever found was the Google sketckup Tutorials, watch them all, if you haven't already, very well worth it, heaps of good how-to info in them.
http://sketchup.google.com/training/...ew_to_gsu.html
I just downloaded them all, theres about 28 of them but there only short, say 4 -7 min each and then I just kept going back as I needed info on a particular tool.
Like the "follow me" tool or the "push" tool, both very handy by the way.

Have fun with it Shazza I will drop back soon for another look.