Castle On A Hill

After we replaced the carpet in the back bedroom with laminate flooring, I took advantage of the cleared floor space to make a big castle on a hill. I thought about making an escape tunnel with Duplo tubes through the inside of the hill and out the bottom. With that cool of an idea, I just had to get started.

It was interesting trying to build the framework for the hill, making sure to allow for the tubes through the inside. Another design consideration was to make the hill sides very steep so that the kids could play around it easily.

In the end I ran out of Green bricks, and used some other colors on the hill. When I made the Stegosaurus later on, and ran out of green again, I bought some more bricks. I obviously needed more bricks. . . . . . . right??

Larry-Boy!!

Larry Boy was a big hit with the kids. They happily tore him down, as kids are wont to do, but it is the one sculpture they asked me to build again. In fact they asked several times over the next year.

I had to buy some white bricks off of BrickLink since I didn't have enough. Ideally the collar would have been white as well -- but I barely got the eyes made. I might have enough now to do the collar as well. I also managed to score a good load of some royal purple bricks (see the window frames on Jrrm's Hotel). The Duplo bricks in this color only come in the small 2x2 size, but I might have enough to make a decent Larry-Boy out of the proper colors.

My First Creation - Duplo Steam Engine

I am going to put all of my larger creations up here for historical and display purposes. This is my first really large scale creation. It features all of the Legos™ that I owned at that time, though a good number were simply dumped into the trailing train car as it provided a convenient container. I built this in November of 2006, and lamented that there were so few blacks in normal Duplo sets. Shortly thereafter I discovered the Duplo Castle sets and I had to buy several of those, as shown by some subsequent creations.

My littlest was just under two months old at the time.

Jrrm's Hotel

My oldest has really wanted to go to a hotel recently. He (and the other two) have always really enjoyed hotels, though their favorite hotel is the housing apartments at the Los Angeles Temple.

More recently they have become obsessed with the movie Bedtime Stories, which talks about hotels quite a bit. The hotel owner is obsessed with germs, and I think that led to the name of this hotel -- Jrrm's Hotel. It is a hotel for ogres.

I try to get them to help me plan out some creations -- here is the drawing I got for this one. Those are supposed to be clouds on the top left, which I managed to recreate.

Here are some pictures with the kids for scale: a picture of the back showing the three floors, one towards the beginning of construction, and finally a "No Vacancy" shot.

I like the sign on top, made with some Toolo pieces to get a 90 degree turn so that the letters face forward.


Here is a nice one with the lights turned on (on the inside, shining through some transparent bricks).