The Kitchen Mantle #08: Summertime Vibes at the Beach!

For the past several weeks, our kitchen mantle has celebrated summer with our latest LEGO set-up:  a full beach scene complete with a boardwalk, beach, lighthouse, and a couple of places to get food and/or beverages.  

Personally, I think this was one of my favorite set-ups of the year but if I'm being honest my two-year-old son didn't dig it quite as much as he did the previous set-up which involved plenty of space shuttles.

For the summertime beach scene, I used a bunch of spare pieces (plus a couple of smaller builds from other sets) and combined those with a trio of rather wonderful Hidden Side sets.  I think LEGO had a great product line going with the Hidden Side brand but I fear the packaging turned off too many people (to me at least, it was never clear at a glance what the heck each set actually was all about based on the box art).  That's neither here nor there for today's post other than it allowed me to get the Hidden Side Lighthouse, Shrimp Shack, and Shrimp Boat all at a nice discount.

Speaking of the Lighthouse, let's start there.  I took the Hidden side set and completely reworked the rock portion to fit better with my mantle space.  I also added in a white picket fence and a small garden for the lighthouse keeper (I also eliminated most of the ghost elements that are included in all Hidden Side sets).  Finally, at my son's request, I added a light brick to the lighthouse so that he could actually turn it on and off.

You can probably see that I also added in a nicer dock for the lighthouse.  The dock is also nice for the couple of boats that I put in the scene (the already mentioned Shrimp Boat plus the speedboat shown in the above photos).

For me though, the real highlight of this particular scene was my beach set-up.

I knew I wanted to try and create a small boardwalk of sorts that would sit up above a beach area.  I'm limited on the kitchen mantle to a depth of about a single 32x32 base plate so it was a bit of a tight squeeze to fit everything that I wanted in to a pair of side-by-side base plates.

The beach portion of the scene features a sand castle, a lifeguard, a few lounging minifigures, plus both a hot dog vendor and an ice cream vendor.  Add that to the coffee shop on the boardwalk and the Seafood Diner and no minifig should go hungry!  

I had a lot of fun putting this particular scene together, it's definitely the one where I did the most custom work for a single scene.  I ended up taking the summer scene down last night and put up a more appropriate scene for the month of October!  My son woke up this morning excited to see what I had set up for him and when he saw it he was super excited (always a fun moment for me as the dad)!  I'll be sure to show off that set-up at a later date...especially since I did an online LEGO shop order earlier today in order to get a few more little bits of things to add to our newest layout.  See, fun for me and for my son!