Minecraft - The Building Phase Begins

By this point in time, I was pretty familiar with the basic functionality of Minecraft and began to have a good understanding of how the world worked. I also had a nice pile of resources sitting in chests under my water covered base. It was time to start doing something with them, so I tackled what was at the time my biggest project. I began to recreate my real life house in Minecraft.

First step was to choose the location. One of my branching tunnels had popped out onto a sandy beach south of my current base and I chose that location as the starting point for my house. Since my real house sits about 3 feet above street level, I wanted it to be elevated too so it would match. I decided I was going to call 1 block 1.5 feet for my scale and thus, my "front yard" would be 2 blocks above the beach. I couldn't comprehend at the time just how much dirt that meant I would need to create my yard. I very quickly drained the stacks of dirt I had been collecting and had to dig more to finish the 2 wide yard all the way around where I would put my foundation. I also quickly realized the poor choice of building location I had chosen. The beach wasn't nearly large enough to hold my house, at least not on the scale I wanted. So, for a while at least, I had a yard and foundation that was floating above the water. Looked good from the front, but really funny from the sides.

Without putting a whole lot of thought into it, I created a cobblestone box that would be my foundation and began to put the flooring on top of it. Wood planks in the dining room representing my hardwood flooring and sandstone everywhere else representing the tile floor that covers the rest of my downstairs. It was about this time when I realized the size of foundation I put down didn't quite line up with the scale I had chosen. I kicked myself for not planning better and drawing it out beforehand while doing the math to make it closer to accurate. But at the same time I didn't want to tear it out and do it again, so I just went with it and moved on. Now, the left half of my house (where I started) is perfectly to scale while the right is squished some and had to have a few things cut out or rearranged. Oh well.

Once I had the downstairs flooring put in, it was time to start the walls and second story. Material of choice: wood. Lots and lots of wood. Remember my tree farm? It was harvested several times to get enough wood planks to make this house. It was a learning process doing this as it was the first time I had created walls and a ceiling from scratch. Previously, I had a preexisting structure to attach them to. After a few falls I learned a few techniques that still aide me today such as putting a block behind you at the end of your wall so that when you're walking backwards placing blocks you bump into it and don't fall off the edge.

Finally it was time to put a roof on the house. I have a dark roof on my house and decided cobblestone would be a good choice. I made a ton of cobblestone steps and began creating the roof. It was quite easy to do, even with the different peaks my roof has. At the top of my main peak, I wound up having only a single line of blocks instead of 2 blocks so I could put steps back to back. I wound up putting a row of half slabs down instead. Very snazzy.

My real life house has been Minecrafted

My house was now complete. I filled in the windows with Glass and lit everything up with torches. In the kitchen, I put down a row of gravel for my countertops and raw wood above for my cabinets. I have a furnace where my oven is and a chest where my fridge is. I also built a fireplace out of stone at the time since clay was nonexistent until a later update. (It's brick now). I even put beds in the rooms and created a "shower" in each of the bathrooms. I was quite pleased with my first real creation.

Photo Gallery

The Right Side of my house.

Back view of the house. If you look close,
you can tell it's floating above the water.

The Living Room. Like my ceiling fans? By this point in
time, I had found clay and really made my fireplace the way I wanted it.

Kitchen. My real counter tops are granite, so this was the
closest thing to a match.

The Master Bath. I even made a nice king sized shower.

The master bedroom.

Up through this point in time, I had been playing on Peaceful just because I wanted to explore and build and not worry about monsters and such. I had always wanted to turn them on and see what they were really like, so one day, I turned them on and started playing in the dark.

At first it wasn't bad. I killed some spiders and skeletons and got string and bones. I was blown up by a Creaper and had to go back and re-collect the string and bones. It was actually fun. Then daytime came and I returned to my house with my spoils, only I heard something in the attic that I wasn't expecting. I went upstairs and heard the "RRRRrrrrrrrr" of a zombie. "Crap," I thought to myself. "I have zombies in the attic!" So I climbed up my latter and sure enough, there were two zombies up there. I never thought about lighting my attic so it was nice and lowly lit for them. I killed the zombies and was getting ready to start placing torches when I heard it. "Ssssssssssssss BOOM!" There was a stinking Creaper in my attic!!! Blew a huge freaking hole in my roof and second floor and killed me in the process. Luckily, I was able to respawn a few feet away in my bed. I gathered my items, saved and quit, went back to peaceful and began rebuilding my house. This time, with plenty of torches upstairs.

This wouldn't be the last time I had to rebuild this house though, but that's a story for another day.