Playability in MOCs

Before my daughter was old enough to play with real Legos (i.e. not Duplo ;) I hadn't thought about the interior so much. And I thought that she could just disassemble the modular into sections if she wanted to play with them. Well, you live and you learn.

Can your hand fit in a roofless modular Lego building? Yes.

Can you play with mini-figures, accessories and furniture inside a modular room with four walls? With much difficulty.

Solution? You knock down the back wall - or even better: build the building without it. This is in fact a two fold winner strategy. A: Your kid gets much better space to maneuvre inside the room and B: You get lots of left over Lego bricks. Win win :)

I am pretty sure that even when my daughter no longer wants to play with Lego (and only build) I will continue to build like this. I can see inside the buildings without pulling off roofs and sections and it is way more economic brick wise.

Lego Friends Figures vs Lego Minifigures

My biggest beef with the Lego Friends sets are the dolls. They all look the same, their hair keep falling off, they can't sit without falling over or sit on a horse, they can't move their hands only their arms, their legs cannot do a split - which is important if you want to make it look like they are walking, running, getting on a bicycle, playing football (soccer) or any other activity that looks like you are in motion. And why do they have to be taller than the regular Lego figure? Aaarrrgh...So frustrating......

And yet my daughter loves to play with them.So maybe it is more a problem for the adult than the child - for whom they were designed. Children are just more forgiving.

Yet I couldn't help making this little illustration - filled with all my adult frustrations:

Okay, that helped - a little bit.

Beauty Salon MOC - Interior

In May of 2014 I made this Lego Friends inspired beauty salon. It was a modular that fitted atop a ground floor of something or other.

In order to give my daughter a lot of space to position and play with Lego figures inside I built only two walls. It worked really well, and when the section was put next to another building, you could not see that a wall was missing.

It was of course a bit more flimsy when the top floor was attached also. So the beauty salon section had to be taken out when she wanted to play with it. And she played with it a lot!

While waiting for their turn the customers can lounge in the green chair, get a cup of coffee from the coffee machine and read a magazine.

Monster Fighters Haunted House MOC

Before my sweet husband bought me the Real Haunted House I used whatever bricks I had to build a copy of it. As I didn't have a lot of the bricks - or indeed the same color schemes - it turned out both very different and very close to the original. I used the building instructions for 10228 to build the house and just improvised along the way to make do with the bricks I had.

After I had build it my husband soon after bought me the real deal :)

My version. In the back one can see my green house that I built to match. Sadly I didn't take any proper pictures of it. It looked quite cool though. With a skeleton on a bench, a withered palm tree and a little water pool with frog.

The original

Side by Side

Lego Café

In 2014 I found a really pretty café on Flickr built by Jorge Barros. A guy who builds truly amazing mocs. I wanted to build a café myself and found inspiration in this image for the bottom part of my build.

I needed a wider build though because I wanted to make the interior playable for my daughter. For this reason I always leave the backs of my buildings open so that my daughter has easy access to the interior.

Here I made a café on the ground floor and a studio apartment with a big bathroom on the top floor. A girl needs a big bathroom with tub and make-up table :)

Front

Interior