Houzz Call: Show Us Your Lego Creations

We like playing with Legos. But high school senior Jess Long really likes making things out of the colorful, iconic pieces. Like, really, really likes it. The 18-year-old Elk Grove, California, student has six 5-foot-tall containers and various large bins with nothing but Lego pieces. Her massive collection — aided in part by her mother, who scours garage sales for pieces — has overtaken their family’s living room.

Long's latest creations? Building model houses based on photos she finds on Houzz.

Long modeled this Lego house on the famous Painted Ladies of San Francisco's Alamo Square Park (previous photo). One day she had Malvina Reynolds' song “Little Houses” stuck in her head, particularly the lines “Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes made of ticky-tacky.”

"I saw the houses and just kept singing that song in my mind," she says. "I thought, ‘That’s really cool and really simple. I bet I could make that.'”


The initial structure of the house took Long a couple of hours to complete. But then she spent about two weeks digging through her bins in search of the right roof pieces. "It took me forever to find those pieces," she says. She added her own touches, too, like switchback stairs and planter boxes.


“I had it in my head that Legos were for boys, but they’re not," she says. "I really like doing this."


The interiors, she says, were the easy part. "I just kept making a box," she says. "Most home layouts are really just a bunch of boxes. If you keep doing that, it’s pretty simple."

But she also understands that her models aren’t exactly representative of real-life buildings. “I should probably have support beams in the middle of the rooms. If it was a real house, it wouldn’t be structural. But Legos don’t have to. They just look good.”

Long is selling this crafty model on Craigslist for $100. The money would likely go to pay for college. The degree she's considering pursuing? Architecture, of course.

Listen to the Malvina Reynolds song that inspired her

Are you a Lego master? Please show us your creations below!

More: What Could You Design With Lego's New Architecture Kit?

URL: Houzz Call: Show Us Your Lego Creations http://www.decor-ideas.org/cases-view-id-21262.html