This man wants to sell his home. He's using a Lego replica to help

As It Happens4:30This man wants to sell his home. He's using a Lego replica to help

When selling a house, it's not unusual to have detailed photos taken, or to nicely stage the rooms. But including photos of a Lego replica of your home is a little outside the norm. 

"I think we have a really great house and I think converting it into a Lego project, I hope I really did it justice in terms of making it look real and look nice," Andrew Huddleston, a homeowner and Lego enthusiast, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

When Huddleston decided to sell his four-storey townhouse in Washington, D.C., which goes on the market Friday, he already had the Lego custom design built. 

All he had to do was add the photos to his post on the real estate site Zillow. His real estate agent was all for it. 

"He thought it was creative and original, that it might be a way to to get people's attention and do something different," said Huddleston.

Adding the detail

It wasn't his first big Lego project. While stuck inside during the COVID-19 pandemic, Huddleston rediscovered his love of the plastic bricks and created some larger art pieces. He did two Lego portraits of characters from the television series Dallas, done in a pixilated style. 

But the three-bedroom, four-bathroom mini replica house was his first venture into designing a Lego building.

"I thought it would be a fun project to try to recreate the space as realistically as possible, to build the four-storey townhouse and decorate it in the way that we had it decorated and furnished at the time," said Huddleston.

Huddleston started with the base design and blueprints of the house. Once he had the foundation laid out using pieces from his personal Lego collection, he ordered bricks that would match the colour of his home. 

With the help of stickers, he was able to get the art on the wall just right. Huddleston even built an additional, mini-scale version of the project house to sit within the Lego build itself. He says overall, the project took several months to complete. 

The flexibility of Lego bricks

Graeme Dymond, a certified Lego professional in Toronto, says the project shows both Huddleston's innovation and how flexible a Lego brick can be.

"This kind of build highlights the amazing potential Lego bricks have to create detail-focused experiences that can be customized to meet a variety of needs," said Dymond. 

Dymond, who organizes the Bricks in the Six Lego fan event, has made similar projects through his company Dymond Bricks. 

"I've had many agents approach me with similar requests to help build awareness of their properties,"  said Dymond.

Huddleston has already moved to Portland, Ore., and is still getting settled into his new home there. But once he's unpacked, he plans on displaying the Lego version of his old townhouse.

And there might be another build in the future. 

"Our new house is beautiful also, and it's very different. So I think I'll probably give it a try when things are settled down and I have time for that kind of project," said Huddleston.