Happy Places
I’ve loved toy shops for as long as I can remember. If I happen to be in town there’s an excellent chance that I’ll pop into John Lewis just to look through the toys. Naturally I’m drawn to the Lego, but everything gets a good look and poke at.
I missed the original release of the Lego Winter Village Toy Shop 10249, so I made my own one a couple of years ago which worked out pretty well except for a few vital parts I was missing. Then I adapted it for the next season which ended up kind of gingerbreadish.
Lego Blog: Homemade “Winter Village Toy Shop”
Lego Blog: Gingerbread “Winter Village” Toy Shop
It’s a very appealing build and I’m thrilled that Lego have re-issued it this year. We’ll be getting it and establishing a Christmas Lego box for annual building and displaying. We’ll stick all the amazing Christmas themed Star Wars figures in it too.
Bigger Is Better
The Lego Winter Village Toy Shop is adorably dinky which means you can’t actually put many toys inside, so it sucks as a shop in all but the most distant alpine gift shops. Time for an upgrade.
I began by just scaling up the original design by a few studs or brick heights. It makes everything so much bigger! Especially the spaces between everything. I wanted to use all the new pretty colours I’d acquired recently, like a small quantity of sand blue and dark red plus the brown and gold colour scheme from the gingerbread version.
The roofing gave me the usual hell, but I learned some new things about hinges and fixing slopes in place, so I guess it was all worthwhile. One day I swear I’m going to make the roof first and then make the rest of the building.
The scaled up size gave me a lot of trouble in trying to recreate the nice decoration under the peaked roof. A chance flipping over of a Lego box gave me the ‘O’ in the sign and a happy half hour trying to make letters that fit with it. I’m pleased with the result:
There was a little bit of space left though and I couldn’t think what to stick in there. The result… a dog?
Internal Spaces
With the scaled up size I figured I’d have tonnes of space to put stuff within. I take great pleasure in tiling the floors – it’s an addiction of some kind I’m sure.
The attic space gets filled with old toys and kittens of course:
The first floor is yet more toy storage (for reasons that will become clear shortly), and a spot for sewing things. The sewing machine is one of my favourite little builds. It uses the Classic Lego Space Utensil Control Panel 2342 which I loved as a kid.
The ground floor, despite being almost twice the size of the original still has almost no damned space in it! But as you can see, I’ve done my best to cram it as full as my favourite toy shops. I’m very chuffed with the Scooby Doo coloured chest of drawers and the micro spaceships on display in the window. The rack opposite the windows is supposed to be board games. That may or may not work.
Overall I’m well pleased with how it came out! It’s time to take it apart and build something else.
More pictures here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/eric_the_bewildered_weasel/albums/72157659624200636
0 thoughts on “We Have A Problem With Books”
I’m with you on all counts.
This is an amazing post and one that I feel I could have written, minus the humor, readability, and references to A levels. Interestingly, we also have very similar reading tastes and opinions. While I haven’t read everything that you have, I agree with all you said about those I did read. The only place we diverge is that I live in an apartment and had I not decided long ago to get rid of some books when the sheer volume of them reached a critical mass I would surely be dead, crushed under a huge pile of heavy tomes. Although I do miss certain editions I once had, overall it has worked out pretty well for me.
A couple of notes. The Doctor Who book was likely Planet of the Spiders (a less inspired title I can not imagine) and while you’re right about the later Hitchhiker books, the sequence at Milliways in the 2nd book is my favorite part of the “trilogy.”
And lastly, I also still have my copy of the Hardy Boys Survival manual and once tried to make a survival kit like they describe in the book. However, I much prefer an earlier Hardy Boys spinoff, The Hardy Boys Detective Manual, in hardcover, which came out a few years earlier, and had so many great detecting tips. all sadly useless now in the internet era.
We clearly are the finest of people! I have recently declined the opportunity to take all the books I left at my Dad’s house when I left home. It was difficult, but partly from not having seen them for years I managed to get it down from 400 or so to a mere hundredish. I don’t know where I’m going to put them…
Ah yes, that sounds exactly as terrifying a title as I recall. I seem to remember that the cover of Planet of The Spiders was too horrible for me to even want to touch. You make a good point about Milliways. It’s possible I’m conflating several of the THGGTTG books into one.
Ah! I had no idea they did more manuals. I don’t know where I got the Survival Manual, but I suspect it was a marvellous second hand bookshop in Burton on Trent that had a charming Dachshund named Carl who would bark until stroked.