the tutorials that come with maya are great.
read what you need when you need it though, since you're learning this in college (university right?)

the model itself looks ok, it's good for only 3 weeks, you need to do something about the edges on that bath though. you're getting that weirdness in the colours when your faces are screwed up.
check how many edges are on the faces that make up the bath and check for whether or not they are soft or hard. (Go Display > Polygons > Soft/Hard Edges, hard edges will be full lines, soft will be dotted lines)
i find that the weirdness is caused by either non-planar faces (faces with vertices that don't ly on the same plane), faces with more than four edges (not always, but its sometimes the cause), or because of a mix of hard and soft edges.
...more likely than not the weirdness inside the bath is caused by the second reason. i'm guessing from the way the surface is shaded.... or it could be the last reason....
if you click display wireframe on shaded (an option somewhere in the panel's menu) then you'll see.

as for textures, it looks like you didn't lay out your UVs. until you know what texture mapping is, you should just assign solid coloured material (there is a free tutorial from mike in the video tutorial section that goes over some texture mapping i think)


also... what is that thing in front of the tv? the thing that's sticking out from the ground?