Life at Sea

Ahoy, and welcome to your new home and a Life at Sea! This offshore house is built up on an old public dock used to look out over the vast, blue sea. There's a 2 story house with a spacious living room, an a galley kitchen on the main floor. On the upper floor, there's a cozy bedroom, and an additional balcony with a viewfinder, so you can look out to the horizon. There's even a life raft off the upper deck for emergencies.

Don't mind all the wildlife and critters that have made their home along the structure. Just don't go swimming! Sharks have been spotted close to shore lately. Luckily if someone takes a dip, they're not far from an old mossy canoe, or a ladder to climb back up to safety.

When you need to re-train your land legs, take a quick stroll back across the dock, and you'll be back on dry ground in no time.

I had several goals for this design. I wanted to design a type of building that was a little unconventional. I started going through some mockups of how a house completely on the water could look, and then I decided to go with the dock style structure. I also wanted to keep it a similar size to a 32x32 modular, so I built the "baseplate" up with standard plates, and chose to use rounded corners to give it a little less of a "rigid" look. I kept up this motif with the baseplate for the dock/land build as well. I think this gives the build more of a free floating, less restrictive style than if it were built on a squared off plates.

I also wanted the structures to be able to lift off, similar to how modulars or the Medieval Blacksmith are built. Recently that has become a go to in my designs, because I feel it allows you to have a very detailed interior, without sacrificing the exterior to accommodate hinges to open the build up.

Otherwise, I tried to fill this build with as much attention to detail as I could. the dock/land build is separate from the base of the house, allowing you to place it further away, to simulate the house being even further out at see. I also wanted the build to look good from each angle. My intention was for the land to come across as continuous, while also having the rocky cliff beneath it look good from any side. I think I accomplished that, and believe this would look good in any city/sea set up!

Some other details I wanted were some greenery and algae that have grown up on the main structure of the house, so I changed the color of the bricks accordingly to represent the wood showing a gradient of what section is wettest/most covered in algae. Along with that I added a dark green canoe, to represent a very old fishing boat that has been chained up and forgotten. I also wanted the build to look alive, so I added the animals that I thought seemed most appropriate: a couple of seagulls that have built nests, a crab who found it's way onto the canoe, even some shark fins popping up above the surace!

All in all, this set contains about 2,500 pieces, thought a large portion of that is from the tiles used for flooring. I only included 1 figure, as the interior of the house seemed most appropriate for 1 figure.

Thank you for taking the time to look at and read about my design! I hope you'll consider supporting my project, so that we may one day have Life at Sea become and official set!

-ThatOneGuy_Steve