The Drowned Lego: First Floor

First Floor - 11,693 pieces

1. Chapel Side Room

2. Chapel

3. Chapel Bath Room

4. Car and Motel Exterior

5. Studio Gates

6. Gatekeeper's Office

7. Secretary's Office

8. Executive Boardroom

9. Chess/Script Room

10. Doctor's Exam Room

11. Doctor's Office

12. Doctor's 1:1 Room

13. Wig Room

14. Seamstress's 1:1 Room

15. Studio 5

16. Seamstress's Workroom

17. Cinema

18. Buchanan's House

19. Small Motel Rooms

20. Faye and Harry's Room

21. Motel Office

22. Grocer's Shop

23. Grocer's 1:1 Room

24. Seamstress's Shop

25. Drugstore

26. Psychic Shop

27. TV Repair Shop

28. Romola's Shrine

29. The Arcade

30. Tuttle's Toy Shop

31. Tuttle's 1:1 Room

32. Saddlery

33. Games Room

34. Box Maze

35. Back of Motel

36. Romola's Caravan

37. Mossy Caravan

38. Dwayne's Caravan

39. Badlands Jack's Caravan

40. Trailer Park Exterior

41. Badlands Jack/Andy/Barman's 1:1 Area

42. Forest

43. Horse and Stars

2. Chapel, 1. Chapel Side Room, and 3. Chapel Bath Room

The only one of these rooms that actually has a scene take place within is the bath room, where the Dust Witch bathes Dwayne at reset time. The whole chapel area is definitely a presence in general, though, which is why I'm including that exterior shot – it's what comes to mind when I think of it. The light-up cross above the doorway is created by negative space with a translucent yellow piece behind it, rather than being something that I attached to the wall – so if you were to shine a light through it, you'd theoretically get the same effect that Mary sees when she's outside doing her dance of shame.

4. Car and Motel exterior

I'm not super-thrilled with how the car turned out – it almost looks more like a pickup. But there's not much room to extend the slope of the rear without making the car longer or losing the trunk, and the actual vehicle doesn't have much slope there anyway (it's just one of those things that got magnified when translated to LEGO form). The design also suffered a bit for needing to have opening doors – but I was unwilling to sacrifice those, since the driver's side spends more time hanging open than it does closed. Due to the difficulty of squeezing the virtual camera into limited spaces, this is also the best look at the porch that you're going to see. I did experiment with suspending the porch swing from the awning, but nothing really worked well, so I settled for setting it on a transparent block. The black wall behind the boxes at the end of the street has a massive “Tunnel of Love” mural painted on it.

5. Studio Gates

The iconic entrance to the studio. This part actually came out much closer to the real thing than I thought I'd be able to do. At one point, before I realized I could mount the horses at an angle, I toyed with building them out of smaller pieces, which would have been an absolute nightmare and probably wouldn't actually have looked like anything. These horses aren't a great match for the actual statues, but they are clearly horses.  So that's a plus. The two horizontal panels under the lights should, of course, say “Temple” and “Studios”

6. Gatekeeper's Office

So long and narrow, so difficult to record an image of. This is one of those rooms for which a lot of the detail falls under the category of “stuff on shelves,” which is always tough because the space for building the objects is extremely limited. The tan and black panels on the wall by the lamp are a map and a directory chalkboard, respectively.

7. Secretary's Office

This was the first room I built – my proof of concept, as it were. I started with this one because I found a very clear, well-lit, head on photograph of it, so it seemed like a nice easy one to test the process out. I haven't actually changed anything in here since then, other than trimming the walls (when I started out, I was using 8 bricks as the standard height) and swapping out my original too large doors for the currently-standard too small ones. This was where I first really learned just how much I would need to simplify things – each half of that desk also contains two phones, a name plate, a pencil holder, multiple piles of paper, and assorted bits and bobs – but trying to fit anything else on there would be disastrous (I might have gotten away with the name plate). Still, I think the idea comes across pretty well, and this process served as the model, essentially, for the rest of the project.

8. Executive Boardroom

Although it's really just one big room, this is, in every practical sense, two rooms. The big, empty side with the table and the side with the stage. There's really nothing to the table half of the room – just the big table itself, which serves as a sort of stage for several impressive solo and duet dances. The other half of the room is much more interesting, though, with the 2-way mirror in to the Buchanan house, the big pile of curio cabinets, and of course, the stage – home to one of my favorite numbers, the Codfish Ball. That basket at the back of the stage contains a taxidermy baby deer, which I couldn't build at this scale. More recently a pedestal has been added so that the deer sits closer to the level of the railing, but I prefer it this way, how I first saw it.

9. Chess/Script Room

I've only been inside this room once, but there's not a tremendous amount to it unless you want to delve into the contents of the pile of scripts. Mostly just large, empty space.

10. Doctor's Exam Room

Another greatly simplified room – those metal stands on either side of the desk are filled with all sorts of interesting, tiny bits that I couldn't build at this scale. Behind the examination stage you can see a window into the cinema – in actuality it's not transparent like that. It's a screen that becomes somewhat transparent in one direction or the other depending on the lighting. Said screen also has a set of dark curtains that can be drawn across it, which I have omitted from the model. There are also really five of those booths at the back of the room in real life, but as you can probably see, there's no way I was going to squeeze two more of them in there.

11. Doctor's Office and 12. Doctor's 1:1 Room

There are quite a few modifications that I had to make to the Doctor's office.  That weird brown shape near the door is actually more of a hollow, frame-like structure, maybe a coat rack of some sort? Above the desk you can see several pairs of eyes in frames – the real ones are, of course, much smaller, and there are several pairs of eyes in each frame. The two big white panels are medical diagrams – a human eye, a fish, and a cat. You may notice that I just listed three of them – there should be a third diagram somewhere in the room, but I don't actually remember where it goes. The real bird on top of the cabinet is black and stands on a white branch, but that particular bird piece only comes in white – so I also inverted the branch color in order to maintain the color balance. Over in the 1:1 room, things are fairly sparse. The most memorable features are the infamous eye chart beside the door and all of the smaller inkblots hanging on the wall, which no one who has been embarrassed by this talky 1:1 will ever forget.

13. Wig Room and 14. Seamstress's 1:1 Room

The Wig Room is another room that exists purely for atmospheric purposes – no character ever sets foot in there. The colored tiles on the side wall represent clumps of hair hanging there – if memory serves, they're not full wigs. The shelf on the wall near the mirror should contain more heads with wigs, but in order to fit them on there, I would have had to make it bigger than I felt comfortable with, so just imagine them there. The Seamstress's 1:1 room is probably the biggest victim of wall color issues in the whole model. The actual room is sort of a light olive green, which doesn't really have a good match in the world of LEGO pieces. I used a (much too light) green-grey for two walls, but logistical concerns forced me to stick with the colors of the adjacent spaces for the other two walls – so just imagine all of the walls are the same color, and that color is not any of the colors you see here. Sorry, you can't win them all.  In the first picture, you can see the waiting area in the hallway right outside, complete with (Non-functioning!  Treachery!) water cooler.

15. Studio 5

I'm very proud of this room. As I've mentioned in a few other places, LEGO does not do diagonal well. The sets on stage, however, are all about the odd angles. So it was pretty satisfying when I actually managed to make the structure work (although if you look closely, you can see one point where I cheated). The color of the stripes in the bedroom set was the source of much controversy during the research phase of the project. I started out thinking the non-white stripes were yellow, but others told me they were pink. In actuality, they're a yellowish-tan background with pink flowers. So kind of both. I stuck with yellow because the yellow-tan is the dominant color, but I didn't want to use tan because it would look too much like the kitchen set. Also, on the bed, you can see another example of the restrictions of using only real pieces – the curved bits on the side don't come in dark blue, so I had to cheat them with black ones.

16. Seamstress's Workroom

This is a heavily simplified room – it's just full of little tiny bits. For some reason, I'm particularly pleased by the two little sewing machines, and very grateful that LEGO actually produces a chicken piece. As for the clothes maze. . . everything I've come across indicates that this is the layout, and my memory tells me that it's definitely something like this – but when you're in there, it just feels so much longer and more complicated.  The colored stripes on the wall are bleeding through from the Drugstore, not something that actually exists in the maze.  The second image also gives you a glimpse of the photos of the stars of Temple Studios, hung up on the wall in front of the waiting area.

17. Cinema

When I first heard rumors of what you might find on set, this is the one that blew me away the most, even more so than the desert. An actual, working cinema inside the show! Madness! Of course, it's actually a very tiny cinema, but still impressive. The screen provides a view of the Doctor's examination room, resulting in by far the skeeviest moment of the entire show. All of those flat panels are, of course, movie posters, and the marquee above the door reads “Eyes Without a Face.” This was one of the rooms I first built early on in the process, when I was trying to use sloped bricks to recreate the texture of the curtains on the walls. The result was kind of cool, but took up way too much space, so I don't for a second regret scrapping it in favor of what you see here.

18. Buchanan's House

. . . or William and Mary's house, if you don't dig too deep into things. Kind of an interesting case, in that there's a decent amount of documentation of one portion of the room, but the other half is more of a mystery. I'm pretty sure the two chairs along the same wall as the front door should actually be angled (or at least the one in the corner), but again, not sure. I was really kind of guessing with some of the stuff at that end of the house – it's not a space I spend much time in. Note the window into the boardroom at the back – that's actually a two-way mirror.

19. Small Motel Rooms and 20. Faye and Harry's Room

The large room belongs to Faye and Harry, and I'm not really sure about the other two. One of them is Andy's, and one of them may belong to Drugstore Girl (or so I've heard, second-hand). Conrad takes up residence in the room on the end at one point, just to further confuse the matter. Not a lot to describe about these rooms; they're pretty simple – although I'm definitely shortchanging the detail on them a bit.  Bed sheet colors are a guess; I can't remember what any of them actually are, despite the massive amount of time I've spent in Faye and Harry's Room in particular.

21. Motel Office and 22. Grocer's Shop

These are both feel pretty close to right, but there are a few inaccuracies. The Grocery's Shop has one too many banks of shelves (I realized this when I returned to the show after I first built it, but the room looks more right to me with the shelves, even if it's not actually accurate - so I left it). The motel office is missing the curtain between the front and back halves (none of the options I tried felt right) and a tiny bookcase next to the chair in the back corner, which I couldn't convincingly build to fit in that space. The black bits on the wall in front of the reception counter are mailboxes.

23. Grocer's 1:1 Room

This room feels much bigger than it actually is – I'm amazed at how much they squeezed into this tiny space. Somehow, that U-shaped path that you follow seems like it must continue curling around into a spiral – but it doesn't. Not much to say about the build – it's a bunch of boxes and some walls.

24. Seamstress's shop

The poor Seamstress. Yet another of her rooms that suffers from having to adopt the wall colors of the spaces alongside, because there isn't room to cover them up – although that red wall kind of fits tonally, at least. Like most of her spaces, the whole thing is filled with little fiddly bits that I couldn't possibly replicate, but in this case, the majority of them are organized into little jars, which helps.

25. Drugstore

This is my very favorite room in the whole model (and one of my favorite rooms in the show). I feel like that delicate balance between simplifying and recreating worked out better here than anywhere else. It was also the only model that ever (sort of, anyway) existed in real life – when I was working out the scale of the model, I built a very rudimentary version of this room out of spare parts to test it out. Note the secret tunnel in the phone booth.

26. Psychic shop and 27. TV repair shop

A pair of essentially unused rooms (Andy does pop into the psychic shop at the end of the show), so there's not a lot to them. The psychic shop is yet another victim of the “that piece doesn't come in that color” effect, as there are no green hinged bricks, which were necessary for the angled wall (why oh why did they build angled walls into this set?).

28. Romola's Shrine

Tucked away in a nook at the end of the hall, we find a couple of crates, some plant matter, some candles, and a photo of poor, dear Romola, taken too soon. Good night, sweet princess.

29. The Arcade

This is a hugely impressive space, a town exterior so expansive it actually kind of feels like it's outside. In the first image you can see the TV repair shop and a bit of the psychic shop, in the second the drugstore (sadly, I couldn't make the sign take the shape of a cow), in the third Tuttle's Toy Shop and the passageway to the Horse and Stars, and in the fourth the saddlery (with a hint of the motel and Grocer's shop in the background). The gazebo should have some umbrellas rigged up inside (for the photography set-up), but a) there wasn't room and b) there aren't any really good options to represent umbrellas, as the PA's 1:1 room on the ground floor demonstrates.

30. Tuttle's Toy Shop and 31. Tuttle's 1:1 room.

The toyshop is jam-packed with things, all sorts of tiny toys well below my scale. The interior walls are actually a sort of dark green/dark blue, but due to all of the things built into the walls on both sides, I would have had to use that color for a chunk of the Horse and Stars if I wanted to actually go with it.  Thus, I stuck with the brown for the interior walls. The yellow chunk hanging up is meant to represent a large, sculpted crescent moon. You can't really see it in these images, but there is an opening behind the counter, which leads to the 1:1 room. The walls in there are probably really all black, but I left the three different colors intact for the sake of the areas that bordered it. After all, who can actually tell when the lights are out?

32. Saddlery

This used to be Badlands Jack's domain, but now not much goes on in there. The colored panels on the wall represent various animal hides.

33. Games Room

Another room that has fallen into disuse since the departure of Badlands Jack – but unlike the saddlery, this one houses no action at all – or at least, no performance action. There's plenty of gambling action to be had within as, among other thing, the black wall behind the table is filled with chalk marks relating to sports betting.

34. Box Maze

The entrance to the show – for half of us, anyway. It's a much more interesting entrance than the one from the other lift, although the other lift has the benefit of getting you out on your own a bit quicker, if you happen to have a destination in mind already.  The walls should all be black - I'm allowing some bleed-through from the Grocer's here.

35. Back of Motel

. . . and here's that other lift, which lets out into a field of trash, laundry, and cheap wooden furniture. To the left, you can just see a bit of a not-quite-secret passageway, down which the exec will occasionally direct a lone white mask, allowing them to beat the crowd to the Horse and Stars

36. Romola's Caravan

Beginning our series of caravans, first up is Romola's. The interior is completely awash with clippings from magazines and ominous, scrawled notes. Even without Romola herself, it's clear that this is not the home of a well person. In the latter days of the show, the exterior has been largely cleared of such notes, but I'll always remember it with them in place, so here they are.

37. Mossy Caravan

Just a tiny, tiny, tiny space. So tiny I had to create it as basically a box, rather than adding the slopes that are a part of the other caravans. The important thing to note about it is that everything is covered in moss – beyond that, what else can you say about it? The layout is essentially accurate, though, if slightly stripped down.

38. Dwayne's Caravan

Apparently some guy named Dwayne lives here, although as far as I'm concerned, it's just where Romola does her 1:1 and Faye dances in the door. Bedding colors are a guess, since, like most people, my memory for details completely fritzes out during 1:1's.

39. Badlands Jack's Caravan

The most bare and stripped down of the caravans, this used to be home to Badlands Jack, though it was mostly just used for his 1:1. To that end, the back opens up into a hallway, which you can see just a bit of here. Those black cupboards (which are actually supposed to be brown – limited color selection strikes again) contain a little something special, but Jack said he'd kill me if I told anyone.

40. Trailer Park Exterior

A few external views of the caravans, so you can get at the environment as a whole – although I offer only a slight glimpse of that ugly, ugly hut-like structure between Dwayne and Romola's Caravans. The big black plate visible in the second image is, of course, the Horse and Stars sign.

41. Badlands Jack/Andy/Barman's 1:1 area

This is where the door in Jack's caravan leads. What I've built here is all supposition – anyone who gets brought in here spends the whole time blindfolded. It used to be Badlands Jack who brought you in; now it's either Andy or the Barman (but not all Andys and not all Barmen, just to make it confusing). Over by the exit door, which leads into the arcade, you can see the rack of replacement masks – this is the only place where you leave with a different mask than you came in with.

42. Forest

This is almost more of an alternate view of the trailer park, but it does give you a look at the whole mess of trees over there. Also, probably the best look at the fence behind the motel, which I'm quite pleased with. And the weird hut thing, which I'm. . . less pleased with.

43. Horse and Stars

Finally, here we have the home of the most important moment in the show for me (Walking in the Sand) and one of the most fun dance numbers (Hoedown!!!). The real back wall is covered in many, many more skulls than what I've got there, and they are in actuality much smaller. Also, there is sadly no place for me to mount the chandelier or disco ball(!) that are actually in there. The translucent pieces near the small stage represent strings of Christmas lights, and over to the right in the second image you can see the “secret” exit from Tuttle's 1:1 room.