Houses

Over the past couple of days I have been working on some minifigure scale houses that would be suitable for fitting out a street. I have stuck to certain style, and all of the houses are fully furnished internally and feature levels that can come away so that one my see inside them.

This house has 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms over three levels.

I then added a second one I finished this morning:

The blue one has 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms over three storeys.

I then added one of my older models:

There is definitely a sense of cohesion and somewhat of a 'style' about the houses, and I am quite pleased with how they look together. 

Mostly, the designs come from my head, with a little bit of trial and error involved. Sometimes, the placement of the stairs inside the house annoys me, because I want them to work as realistically as possible. 

My First 'Set'

I mentioned in a previous post the fact that I wished to receive one of my own designs for my 21st birthday present. Given the limited number of options in pick-a-brick, I had to make sure I designed the building to fit with which bricks I could buy. I redesigned my haunted mansion, so that it was a little bit more complete and looked ok. It wasn't perfect, and I had to cut down on some of the bricks to make it with in the budget (:S), which did result in some challenges in the actual construction.

This is the set as a 3D model:

And here is the completed model, as built. The photos are a little dodgy.

Manor House

I have been working on this project for about a week now, and it is now complete, 6825 bricks later!!!

As with all my other houses, I have made this one minifigure scale, and I have fitted out all the interiors with furniture and bits and pieces. I think there are 14 bedrooms and 14 bathrooms in this building...

I have custom made bed families before, so that I don't have to build them again every time. I have a single and double bed for different applications, and for this building I also custom made a four-poster.

I have also custom made toilets and sinks for my bathrooms. This time my house had some baths, but I didn't custom make those. I probably should have.

I also made some other custom pieces, including a baby grand piano, a grandfather clock and seating.

I think my next project will be a little smaller. I would like to make more smaller houses that would be suitable for a 'suburb' so if and when I have enough money to buy all my designs, I have models that are a manageable size. 

Digital Designer

As I became more and more time poor, I found that I wanted to use the computer to design my Lego buildings. Not only did it mean I could save works in progress without a mess, it also meant that I could have an unlimited supply of bricks. We had a version of Lego Creator, and I started using that to create my designs. I found it slow and lag-y however, and sought another alternative. And then one day, whilst mucking around on the Lego website... I found Digital Designer.

This program has been amazing, and a constant companion over the past few years. In the beginning it was limited with the number and colour of bricks, but with the more recent versions, the ability to change colours of any brick and the sheer variety of bricks has made my life much easier.

These are earlyish. They are modular additions to Cafe Corner. In fact, I think the one with the green shutters is supposed to be replicating what I built physically. 

The first images blow are my castle. I have been working on this since about 2010. Wow. One day I will finish it. 

Houses have always interested me the most, and I tend to stick with those most often. I entitled the following 'cliff house' for obvious reasons. 

Wanted to have a go at creating a haunted mansion... I like it. 

Another house. 

Slightly different style of house this time. The fireplace took forever (this was before digital designer extended came along!!!)

Small house. 

Oh look, another house!!!

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Going for English Cottage-y feel here. 

 This building was for an assignment... it is modelled off a real building, a mosque, on the capitol island Male in the Maldives.

This one is one of the other mosques on the island. 

This is a rather enormous mansion that I had the pleasure of putting together, before digital designer extended came along. I think it has about 28 rooms and is fully furnished. 

I love this building. I wanted this one for my 21st, but a) it was WAY too complicated, and b) pick-a-brick doesn't have half the pieces :(

I was having an experiment with creating a minifig-scale replica of the Hogwarts Great Hall. I have developed a bit from the early days... 

This was a conceptual project for a 'dolls house' out of Lego. It hinges in the centre allowing access to all the rooms in the house... I like it, I think it would certainly be the sort of thing that would have appealed to me as a child. 

 The next one is a streetscape scene that I put together. All of the buildings I designed myself, but some of the vehicles are pilfered from Indiana Jones sets that we have.

Another house, this one has a basement. Nice and compact. 

Town Houses anyone?

I think that is just about everything that I have 'finished' up to date.