First of all. I'd like to say that you have done two great things here:
You appear to have successfully modeled a space that conveys a warm sense of place successfully. Yes, your render times are long but no one can argue that there is a large amount of detail here and a warm color scheme and good placement of elements and furnishings.
You have created rendering that is decent enough to evoke comments from real masters here that encourage you to raise the bar. These are good signs of a good presentation. You can choose from one of at least 6 or 7 renderers for SketchUp but they will only make the model look so good no matter what you use. I think you have a well lighted and well detailed model. Nice work.
And as far as rendering software is concerned, I like IRender nXt from RenderPlus Systems. Last week they just came out with version 3.0 of their software. This model may only take about 2 hours as opposed to 72hrs.