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: [email protected] Tel: (412) 268-9081
