Better pictures to follow. I present to you, the great community that is Eurobricks, My first public MOC: Ralphie's house from "A Chistmas Story"! This is the culmination of several years of Naval Deployment, LEGO Digital Designer, a great love of the movie and a lifelong love of LEGO! Like everyone else, I LOVE the movie. Maybe a little too much. I'm that guy who doesn't only watch it 1000 times during December, but year round. I'm also a lover of LEGO. And as it turns out these two things go well with each other! I discovered LEGO Digital Designer a bunch of years ago, but never really messed with it. I like to LEGO in real life with real bricks. But being Active Duty in the Navy, you cant exactly just dump your bucket of LEGO in the middle of a warship and start building. So during back to back Persian Gulf deployments (9 months in the Gulf, 4 months home, then another 9 months in the Gulf) I decided to give LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) a try, and what better way than to make an UCS version of Ralphie's house! So during my free time on the John C. Stennis, I would watch "A Christmas Story' endlessly. But it was in a different way these 1000 times. I was looking for all of the details of the house. I would take stills of scenes, a LOT of stills. I had already saved a bunch of pictures of the real house, from www.achristmasstoryhouse.com, so I had a bunch of really good reference pictures to go by. But after months of looking, thinking and trying to figure how best to build it, I was running into some problems. Since the house was REAL, but the interior was all shot on a stage, the two different aspects of this were not happy together. Then I came to realize what needed to be done. I was going to make a hybrid of the two. So the outside of the LEGO house is not 100% true to the real house, but he interior is. A happy combination of the two. Now the Interior is still just built in LDD, but I will be adding it to the real LEGO house as time and funds allow. Also as I built the house in real LEGO, I made some "on the fly" changes. Its quite a bit bigger than my original Digital version. some tweaking of the digital interior will need to be made as I build it in real life. It's still not "perfect" in my mind, so I will be tweaking it as time goes by... So ends the brief history of Ralphie's LEGO House. Here are some fun facts! It contains over 4000 LEGO bricks and one not-LEGO Leg Lamp! From start to finish, I've been working on it (off and on) for over 3 years! It's the ONLY LEGO version of Ralphie's house in the world! I have no idea how much money it has taken to build it! It has some hard to find/rare parts! I had to order all of the green windows from Europe! (But not Italy) What's next? Kevin's house from "Home Alone" Thanks for looking!