Wow, and I thought I was a closet genious with my legos. They have saved me many trips around a room measuring. I also have some braille graph paper that I sometimes either cut into pieces to match a job, or use push pins to attach my pretend appliances or furniture. I have written on the pieces abbreviations like stv for stove. I keep these representation of household items in a box for future use.
At 06:52 AM 1/19/2009, you wrote: >While watching the Steelers pluck some Ravens yesterday, I was playing >with Legos. > >We are going to remodel the kitchen at some point. It is a very small >kitchen and with wanting to take down one wall, space is limited and oddly >placed. > >I broke out the Legos and made about a 1/10 scale model of the floor >layout >with door openings, chimney push-outs, included. > >Both Teresa and I started playing and seeing who could build more accurate >scale models of appliances. She made one seriously nice looking stove and >oven, but I think my refrigerator takes the cake. It is a pretty good >replica of our fridge. Top fridge with pull out drawer freezer. The Lego >model has a door, with handle, that swings open so we can check >clearances. The freezer drawer pulls out, and even stops. > >I used a scale of 1 Lego dot equals three inches. > >This worked out quite well as we could move appliances around and see >where cabinets could fit. I made a bunch of cabinet spacers that were two >dots, six inches wide, that way we could just keep adding them in to fill >a space until we could see how much cabinet and counter space we had. It >worked so well for us. Since, Teresa can't understand my descriptions, >and she is very good at drawing what she is thinking, but then can't >explain the drawing. > >With the models, especially since they are three dimensional, we could >just move things around and see how well they fit. With the doors on the >oven and fridge opening, we could easily see clearances without having to >do a lot of calculations. > >Obviously, since it isn't a perfect scale, more detailed measurements >would need to be made, but this certainly simplified the process. > >I have used Legos for many things over the years. They really are a >wonderful tool. > >-- >Blue skies. >Dan Rossi >Carnegie Mellon University. >E-Mail:<mailto:dr25%40andrew.cmu.edu>d...@andrew.cmu.edu >Tel:(412) 268-9081 > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
