[Finster]

Blender is great but as you say, quite overwhelming. Is having the rendering/animation/textures and other stuff Blender does critical to what you want to do or are you just trying to make 3D objects? If it's not critical I would suggest you start with a simpler program like SketchUp. It's also free and pretty easy to use. Lots of How-to videos on Youtube, plus forums, tutorials, etc. Might be easier to draw what you want in SketchUp and later on render it with Blender. My opinion, not sure how others feel, but hope this helps.