Halsam American Brick Build - Single Story House

In the mid-1950s' Halsam offered interlocking brick building toys made from pressed wood. I'm assembling each of the models shown in the instruction booklet for their 60/1 and 60/2 building sets. I'm calling it the Halsam American Brick Build.

The first build in the instruction book is a single story house.

It introduces a lot of basic building concepts. Note that the photo is processed to make it easy to pick out individual bricks. This is important. In order to ensure maximum stability for the upper window frames, the brick needs to be sitting on an 8-peg brick, not a 4-peg. 

And the 4-peg bricks are scored in such a way that they give the appearance of single bricks when used properly. Most of the builds favor alternating 8-peg and two 4-peg layers. As you can see from the example below, the alternating method (right) looks more realistic.

The build itself was pretty simple.

Single Story House (front)

Another important concept introduced was the chimney. It's basically three 8-peg bricks and two angled roof pieces. They're turned upside down. If you use three bricks (as the instructions indicate), there's enough weight to hold the angled pieces in place. And the whole assembly helps keep the roof angled properly.

Single Story House (back)