Home renovation lego-style

How many lego bricks would it take to build your house?

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Homeowners - forget the recession, put aside the vagaries of the property market and give in to whimsy for a moment.

Free your mind of the concept of bricks and mortar. Tap that dormant, inner child and ask yourself this question - how many Lego bricks would it take to build my house?

What could be more geekishly cathartic than not only instantly calculating how many of the little plastic blocks would be needed to build your house, but also how much it would cost?

The website "LEGO My House", a creation of Movoto.com, has a calculator which asks for the square footage of your home and how many levels.

A two-storey house that is 2,169 square feet (201.5sq m), the median size of an American house, would take 10,798,292 Lego bricks to build it. And it would cost US$1,079,829 (NZ$1.35m).

That should be tempered by the fact that the numbers only account for the exterior of the structure, including the roof. Interior walls are going to require a stack-load more bricks. But once you get over ten million Legos, what does a few hundred thousand more matter, Movoto helpfully add.

The Movoto team were inspired by the Top Gear presenter James May's colossal effort in 2009 in which he built a full-size two-storey house entirely of Lego.

May, helped by 1000 volunteers, used 3.3 million bricks to build a 6m-high house complete with Lego bathroom with working taps and a Lego bed. Sadly, the dwelling had to be torn down as it was too costly to move.

- © Fairfax NZ News