Lego 31012 Family House

This build comes from the creator series and is called the Family House. I got it from Metro during a 20% sales promotion which Metro has several all year round.

At $88 bucks for 756 pieces, it is quite a good price and comes with a not so common light brick which recently are often found in the Winter Village Seasonal sets among other sets. This light brick lights up the house with a nice warm light in the right bigger portion of the house. The box of course highlight this light brick

The back show all 3 builds in more detail, with one build being considered as easy, another medium and finally the main build as advanced. Only the advanced build uses the light brick.

Here is a cover art scan of one of the instruction manual. The advanced build is given 2 manual whereas the medium and easy one comes with 1 each.

So opening the box unveils a cardboard backing with the instruction manual. This is great as it will keep the manual from being bent or crumpled. This was in the recent past found only in exclusives sets but are now the bigger standard Lego sets are getting this good treatment and hopefully it continues. This set does not come with a sticker sheet and the bags un-numbered. What is great as well is the big plates used in this set. The main build is 32 studs wide, which is the same as modulars but slightly shallower at 24 studs. Might in the future, mod it slightly to join it to my modulars.

Moving onto to the minifigs. This set is slightly sparse if one compares to the modular ones and has only 2, one male and one female. Older creator houses come without any so this has to be considered an improvement in this case. It seems the males is holding a remote control for his remote car. The remote car microbuild is pretty well done I must say and they seem to be gaining traction in Lego sets.

The next piece we build is a small yellow car that seats 1 person only. So it is a little small but I understood why which is obvious later on in the build.

At the end of the first instruction manual, the bottom level is complete. We will look at some of the interesting feature found in there next.

There are 2 side doors with one being next to the garage.

Near it is a small pool, which has a light probably to make sure some poor bloke does not accidentally fall into it and drown.

Some small plants are found at the side of the main entrance.

The furniture at the ground floor is rather sparse. Not much other than a table and chair. Well at least the table has a nice milk carton.

There is a nice cosy looking fireplace though so that in the winter nights this place would not be bleeding cold.

Another door can be found next to the fireplace chimney. So at build has a total of 3 doors all over the place.

Here is a shot of the build when it is opened. This makes it easier to access it and place all the minifigures or whatever during role playing.

The build uses a 2 simple elements to hold and 2 halves together. 

It does the simple of job of holding them together well so no complaints here.

The next build is the 2nd level of the house. One side is the ceiling and hold the chandelier with light bricks.

Here we have a close up of the light bright mounted at angle before it gets completely covered up by the roof bricks.

Here you can see the light brick lighting up the chandelier piece.

Too bad it does not look convincing enough that the chandelier itself is lighting up the space. Never the less, it still looks pretty awesome.

Here is the 2nd part of the 2nd floor. It consists of a small room for a bed that has a lampshade or some sorts. Outside it, there is a small grill.

My chief complaint here would be the small room is so small that it is very hard to put a minifig in there lying asleep on the bed. Making it worse is the presence of the lampshade.

Finally a shot of how the whole build looks like assembled up. Gorgeous and looks very modern indeed. In fact it is so far the most modern looking Lego house that I have in my collection. The rest look more like preserved heritage buildings.

Here is a shot of it fully opened up with the car put into the garage. As you can see the car fits lengthwise exactly. Hence why the car build was rather small.

To end off this review, here is a shot of the house with the light brick in action.