Furnishings and Floorings

Chelsea working on furniture

Everything slides around too much on the foil.

Today we worked more on making furniture and we rethought the whole cardboard flooring idea. As we make more furniture we see that it slides around a lot on the slippery aluminum foil that we put on the cardboard, and that makes it a pain in the neck to play with the layout. Not only that, we also realized that once the top frame is on, it's still really too low. The floor needs to be about an inch higher than the cardboard one we glued in. The Duplo (large Lego) base is too chunky and we don't really want to glue it onto the cardboard or smaller Lego since the surfaces are so nubby.

We decided to try making a few bases with the regular sized Lego and sticking the larger Lego sheets to it. That is going to

A better way

work much better. We can more easily take it in and out of the shell, and more easily attach furniture and Lego people to it. The grooves may also make it easier to wire. We'll see. We experimented with a few different Lego means of holding up the floor and finally found the best one to hold up a sheet of Lego. Art and Andrew went out to Toys-r-Us and got sheets of Lego for the upstairs and downstairs floors. We will re-measure and then see about cutting the Lego sheets to size.


 Going with the Lego sheet floor, we decided to glue the flat Lego

Bedroom set

pieces to the furniture we have already made, and we did the same to the furniture we made today. Chelsea worked on a number of whimsical furnishings using a variety of media. While fishing through vats of Lego (and Bionicles and Hot Wheels here and there) for the base, we also retrieved a good many more Lego people and Lego people parts.

We brainstormed a bunch about behaviors for the dollhouse. Do we want them to be automatic or interactive? How much harder will it be to make them interactive? We know we want lights for the disco and bedroom at least, and Andrew wants to record and

Toilet!

include the sound of bacon sizzling in a pan. Chelsea made a very cute frying pan from some discarded jewelery and a paper clip. She also made a rather amusing toilet - but do we really want toilet noises? And what soundtrack should the disco have? Can people choose tunes? How will the Lego people dance on the platform?

The upstairs is still an issue. The plan is to put the bottom floor in and then measure the distance from the bottom floor to where we want the ceiling to be and then try to take another, more precise measurement of the top floor. The tricky thing is that, because the shell slopes upwards and inwards, the higher we go, the less surface area we will have for the second floor.

 

Various furnishings, now with Lego glued beneath them