finnbricker

To me, the Toy and Grocery Shop is a big disappointment. Whereas the bike shop included great architectural details (mostly the window designs) and was well suited for modular conversion, the toy store looks just like something a kid would moc. Basically white and sand green bricks and sand yellow windows. The roof decoration is the only exception, otherwise it's just bricks on bricks, no details, no window designs, nada. Of course the price gave some hints about the size of the set, but come on, this house is 8 x 10 studs. Far smaller than the residential CREATOR houses. To me, the price seems expensive. I suppose my disappointment mostly lies in the fact that I had hoped for something in the bike shop style, so I could mod it into a modular. No luck here – maybe 2016? :(

A wonderful MOC! I love the details, the windshield washing equipment etc. I would like to see more of the shop's inside. It sits very nicely with the modulars even if it's not a building. Do you have an estimate of the piece count? Wouldn't it be great if TLG did one proper modular a year PLUS one set with a smaller piece count (say max. 1000 pc) that would complement a Modular City? I agree with Glendo, this would be a great set.

A very good idea to use the strawberry prints as lids for the jam jars!

Wasn't there a tow truck 60056 only last winter?

I tend to agree with Off the wall and Eurotrash here – while I do admire those of you who create astonishing interiors, I tend not to do it myself. Why? Because it's boring – the same bathrooms, kitchens, sofas and beds all over and over again. Not my cup of tea. On the other hand, I like the Friends interior sets and have furnished my modulars with the interios from Olivia's house, Mia's bedroom, Andrea's bedroom etc. but many buildings remain empty on the inside. One exception, however, are shops. There's no point in building a, say, florist, if there's no interior, just a sign. And I like creating those shop interiors because they don't have to be repetitive like apartments tend to be.

I'd say the modularization process is relatively easy. My café turned bank, for example, only borrowed the existing designs. First I built the café according to the instrucions. Then I basically kept the backside as it was and used the facade with minor modifications plus built walls in between. It really didn't take very long and I think the result was quite good. An extra floor would be great, and it'll probably come with time. Check the bank here: http://www.eurobrick...showtopic=97151 In the same topic you'll also see my modularized bike shop. It took a little more time, effort and creativity but I could take advantage of many of the professionally designed features. Even if I would like to claim that my moccing skills are awesome, they really aren't and when I create something from scratch, it never turns out as complex, as diverse and as exciting as the MODs. Building something according to the instructions is nice, but modding, where I can use my creativity but combine it with the professionality of the TLG designs, is even better. Of course, this is only my opinion and recommendation but I would go for the MOD way. Buy two sets, make sure you have extra bricks, plates and tiles in the colours needed and start modding 31026! As far as money is concerned, I paid €140 for two 31026s, which is 10 euros less than a typical modular costs. The extra bricks mostly came from PAB walls and the amount used corresponds maybe to €20. So, for €160 I got one 32x32 corner modular and one 16x32 modular. Not bad, I think. You'll likely find yourself spending substantially more if you create something from scratch. I haven't yet seen anyone else's modded 31026s. If you have links to any, I'd appreciate them!

Let me try to prove my point with this very quick LDD creation based on 7641/60031 City Corner. I've tried to stay true to the original but have added some details around the windows to make it a little less plain. Even so, it stands out as plain and dull compared to the 31026 MOD. Having said that, I have to admit that this City MOD is appealing in its own way, too. It has a kind of German-Scandinavian 1950s vibe to it, and if you look at such buildings in real life, they really are very plain.

The 31026 Bike Shop & Café is certainly a lot more detailed than your average City building. City buildings have all kind of play activities like windows falling out etc but 31026 has architectural details. In this respect, it is more closely related to the modulars than to City, I think. But of course the 31026's scale is all wrong from a modular perspective. It's too small in every way. However, it is relatively easy to mod the 31026 into a modular that, the architectural details of the original preserved, fits quite nicely in with the official modulars. Here's my example: City buildings can of course be modularized, as well, but whereas you get the scale right, the architecture just doesn't fit in unless you mod it seriously. The buildings are just too plain. The Friends shops have nice details, but are always only one floor high. I would also be delighted if TLG released 16x32 modulars. Maybe one 32x32 and one 16x32 a year? That would be perfect. But I'm also satisfied with more sets like the 31026 – it gives every one of us a nice little summer project, modding it to fit the modulars.

Wonderful! And full of action! So many things going on there. A nice diorama of city life. I like the newspaper kiosk a lot.

Pics resized. Sorry for that! Superfunk, I'm sure you love modular police stations Yours in very impressive, too, and my interior is never going to be as well-thought out as yours is. I'm envious Yeah, it's big! It's going to sit on one side of the city square, with a double-sized GE opposite to it.

This is my largest and most ambitious MOC so far. I consider it a MOC rather than a MOD. It's based on two 7498 sets, but I haven't in any way tried to be true to the original design – I have borrowed a little this and that, but mostly it's my own design. This is also my first LDD-MOC. I designed it with LDD first and then ordered two 7498 sets along with a heap of BL and PAB pieces. It's still in some ways a WIP. First a couple of general shots from different angles. You will notice two Spring Scene 40052 fountains and a 40078 Hot Dog Cart in the street, plus two 4436 Patrol Cars and a 60041 motorcycle from Crook Pursuit. The garage holds two 7286 Prisoner Transport cars (the door is just about high enough to let them in when the searchlight is facing downwards...). The searchlights on the roof as well as the antenna are borrowed from 7498. The station sits on four 16x32 baseplates – two dark grey ones (the colour of the garage floor) and two green ones (allowing for small patches of grass by the entrance). The roof doesn't have many details, but the big sign reminds everyone in Lego city that there's heavy police presence. A butterfly has found its way up on the roof, too. Look at the poor hot dog seller – a seagull (from 5770 Lighthouse Island) has stolen a sausage from him! The backside is very plain. While the exterior is finished and complete, the interior still requires a little this and that. There is, for instance, no staircase yet. We'll start from the top floor. The top floor houses the chief's private office (down right) with a great view over the city. There is no interior here, yet. I'm thinking of a big desk, a secretary's desk, a conference table etc. The empty corner down left is where I plan to place the staircase. Top left is where mugshots are taken (borrowed from 7498). The two small booths are interrogation rooms, crapmed and without windows. I bet the criminals don't want to stay there too long. The lights outside indicate whether the room is in use. The hallway also has a coffee machine and a water dispenser as well as two trashcans, the green one for recycling paper waste of course. The coffee machine is close to the interrogation booths, so if you want to pretend to be the good cop, you can easily fetch a cup of joe for the suspect. The middle floor is the location of the holding cells. No built-in escape routes here, and the walls are two studs thick. There are four cells with a bunk bed and a toilet (by the way, the cells are the only places in the whole building to have toilets!) and a smaller cell with only a bunkbed. Outside the cells is a narrow hallway. The middle floor also houses a couple of work stations, but they're not of a very high quality, I'm afraid. Down right, the computer monitors are blank (a virus, maybe!) and down left, the cops don't have chairs to sit on. Well, the staircase is going to occupy the left side room anyway, so this should be sorted out at the same time. Still a WIP. The ground floor houses the main entrance to the building. When you walk up the grand staircase and turn left, you reach the entrance to the upper floors (still WIP). Turn right and you'll get to the office where the police department serves their citizens. This is where you hand in your application for a passport or a residence permit, seek for assylum, report a crime etc. There are seats for those who have to wait, a water dispenser and a service desk with room for two clerks. The garage is in the back but there's no entry directly from the garage to the interior. Thanks for watching and reading! And I'm looking forward to your comments!

Thanks for the comments. There might be an interior one day, then again there might not. These residential interiors are a little boring IMHO – shops are a different thing, but with apartments, it's more or less the same over and over again, and in a display, no one is going to see it :( The Jersey Brick Guy, there aren't that many special bricks, so if you can't find it at a decent price, you might want to consider bricklinking. But Creator houses can often be found on auction sites second hand at a relatively good price, I think. mkeller234, I intended to take a pic with the Fire Brigade next door, but I have had to move most of my Lego, including the FB, to another location. Hopefully I can take that pic later this summer. I think they go well together, very much the same scale.

A year ago, I was lucky to buy two 6754 Family Homes at a toy store for a total price of €65. A real bargain! Of all the Creator houses, I sort of like this one the best because of the scale – I know this is a common complaint, but for me, the scale is actually a plus side. It fits nicely with the modular buildings and even as the original version, doesn't look out of place next to the modulars. Once I have room for my layout to be spread out (right now everything is just stacked on shelves) this is going to be placed next to the 10197 Fire Brigade (that's why the firemen are enjoying a quick bite in the garden, provided by their friendly neighbour). The building is basically an original set with the add-on of an extra floor. Some modifications include the top roof tiles (the attic cannot be opened anymore) and the substitution of the main door with three 2x3 windows as well as the sliding door replaced by two large windows. The floors can be detached like in a modular building, but there's no interior (except for the ghost – the second floor seems haunted!). With the extra bricks, I have expanded the patio tiling and the duck pond. The garden also has other elements borrowed from other sets and, if you look really carefully, even some non-Lego elements (BrickForge throwing stars in the bird pool, they're meant to be small pastries). The fence is my very first and modest LDD creation, I played around with the program, came up with this and then brick-built it. The backside is really plain (as is the original, too). This will be placed at a street corner, so both sides here will be hidden by the adjoined buildings.

Did you post this on Ideas?

Yeah, the roof is still WIP. As are the interiors – there will be some eventually.

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, the red seems a little overwhelming especially in the close-up shots of the interior. It doesn't look as bad IRL. I guess that a black-and-white tiled floor would work as well.

This is the first and one of the many Friends sets that I have modularized. I really like the Friends line, as TLG is finally giving us valuable additions to our city – different kinds of shops. This fits in a street corner in a modular layout. The sidewalks are really narrow because I wanted some outdoor seating, but I use road baseplates and extend the sidewalk on the roadplates, so in the layout, the sidewalk will be wider. I've been as true to the original design as possible, but the addition of back walls and a roof have of course required a whole lot of extra bricks. The obligatory lamp post is there as well. Nobody's working right now – I wonder where they went. I don't want any minidolls in my city, but maybe I'll hire Larry from the OPCS to work in the café. The interior has been "minifigurized" – common chairs and lower tables, but all in keeping with the original colour scheme. It wasn't hard to decide which colours to use for the floor tiling. Someone's enjoying a hamburger and a cup of joe inside while outside, the inhabitant of the Hillside House has taken a walk down from the hill to enjoy – something. An empty pint of beer, perhaps? Or, to be honest, two.

There you go! http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=97151 And thanks for encouraging me. I made an account with Brickshelf ages ago, but they never confirmed it and I didn't bother doing anything about it. But now you inspired me to get on with it and I successfully opened an account with Bricksafe and started taking pictures today.

This will be the first Cuusoo/Ideas set that I will buy, but I definitely share the opinion of the majority here – the minifigs are boring. Really boring. Everything else I find acceptable, but the torsos are bland. Would it be too much work to come up with some different female torsos? Do we actually know that the price will be $20?

I bought two 31026 sets in order to modularize these "semi-modular" buildings in a way that would make them fit in modular city but at the same time keeping the detailed architectural features. When I saw the first leaked images of this set, I immediately fell in love with it and thought TLG was releasing something of a "semi-modular", houses that reflect (almost) the same details and style as the modulars, but at the same time creating a set that is smaller and more affordable. Thus, a perfect MOD project! Here's an overview. I built the bike shop according to the instrucions and toyed with it for a while, looking at it from different angles and turning it, opening it and also half-opening it, making a corner building. After a while, I decided to stick with the corner building, since this would allow me to build two facades that can be different, thus taking advantage of the different kind of window designs offered. Only when I had completed the modularization of the bike shop did I build the café, once again according to instructions. It became apparent right away that I would turn it into a 16x32 modular because of the small piece count and the less detailed features. Here you can see the bike shop standing alone. It's still a WIP because the roof misses its final touches. The front will not have reddish-brown plates but a row of dark red ones and another of white ones instead. Also, the two black pieces in the corner are a test – I will likely make them into a whole row at least on the left side, if not the whole roof. Still missing those parts, though, as well as a couple of tiles for the sidewalk. I tried to keep as many of the original features and stick to the original bricks as possible. A lot of extra bricks in white and medium blue were needed, however, as well as all the tiles when modularizing the floors. I decided to enlarge the facade by adding another big window and a second floor window above it. The bike shop sign is new and uses printed tiles from 850425. There's virtually no interior yet. I like this side a lot less. The ground floor is boring and I never understood the idea of a large window/door apparently used as a service entrance (for the bikes?) but oddly placed a couple of steps above street level. I kept the design, with the lamp, anyway in order to stay true to the original model. The second floor uses the window design from the original. The top floor is an addition that came into being after I had sort of completed the model and was left with a lot of extra windows. I started palying around with them and built the window design accorging to the instrucions, then placed all these windows in a row. The row looked pretty nice and I started experimenting with placing them as an extra floor. It turned out okay, I think. The building looked really low with only two floors + roof, so this way it fits in better with the TLG modulars. There is no access to the balcony. Backside. Very plain. There's a back door, just like there always is... This time the back door serves a real purpose, though, since it is the entrance to the apartment on the second floow. God bless PAB walls and their medium blue 1x2's :) Access to the top floor is by ladder. The design is the original one and I used it for roof access – then I decided to build an extra floor, but kept the ladder. Somehow that row of windows reminds me of some kind of a reception hall. Poor ladies in their evening gowns trying to climb the ladder to get up here for a cocktail party or dinner. ;) No interior, not even a banister yet. I'm not that good with interiors, but ultimately I will probably furnish this floor with the furniture from the original. The bike shop will sell red bikes (from the original), medium azure bikes (from the hot dog stand), white bikes (from the police station (7498)) and green bikes (from the pet shop) when the interior is completed. I started work on the dark red and tan building, the café, in an unusual order – from the second floor. I wanted to accommodate the original window design and place two of those windows next to each other for the facade. There's not room for much else, nor is there a need. I think the second floor actually looks pretty nice like this. Then I moved on to the ground floor and quickly realised that the big window was not usable – if I wanted those second floor windows, then I would have to have two similarly sized windows on the ground floor as well. So out went the windows and very nice curtains. I also wanted to place the ATM on the ground floor facade, but was left with little choice for its place, so right in the center it went. The design didn't look anything like a café (and my city already has a café and a juice bar and a pizzeria) so I decided to write "bank" on the sign instead of "café". Kind of looks like a bank with the ATM and the dark red walls, doesn't it? The building only has two floors, and they're not very high, so it looks sort of smallish next to the official modulars. If I know myself, I will probably end up buying one more set + doing some bricklinking and adding another floor similar to the second one some time later on. The back side has some nice details because I mostly just copied the original – windos, doors, steps etc. Those ground floor grills will have to be replaced with tiles, and the sidewalk has to be completed when I get the bricks. Minifigs combined in different ways, plus two extras from the 850425 who actually look like they could be working at the bike shop, servicing and repairing the bikes. Oh, and the stupidly small yellow car? It's not that stupid at all. Think of it as a toy car for kids! I built both cars and now they're on sale at my TRU toy store in Lego city :) I would love to hear your comments on this MOD – while I love the modulars, what I like even more is to buy a Friends, Creator or City set (usually multiple of those) and MOD it into a modular.

Here's my version of the Apple Tree House, to fit my modular city's suburban area. I felt the Apple Tree House as such was very small and not in scale with the modulars, so I bought two sets and tried to combine them to create one "XL-sized" house. All bricks come from those two sets, with the exception of a couple of dark blue roof tiles. (During building, I also decided to substitute combinations of 1x4+1x6 or 1x6+1x6 bricks with 1x10 or 1x12 bricks, because I needed the shorter bricks for other projects.) There's no interior and the garage is as small as in the original, so no cars actually fit in through the low door. Here's an overview. Overview showing the building with the roof detached. As you can see, I have been as faithful to the original design as possible. However, the shrubs and apple trees in the garden have been relocated. Finally the very plain backside of the house. There's an overhang of 1 stud in the back, but this is easily fixed by moving the house forward by one stud, if needed. As you can see, it sits on three 16x32 baseplates, and the extra baseplate came into use in another project. I feel that the garden would have been too big if I had used all four baseplates for this. I hope you like it!

Thanks for your help! I registered at Bricksafe, didn't even know it existed. Registration worked fine, so now I'll just have to start taking pics.

Could someone help me out with Brickshelf? I tried to register there months ago, but I never received the email that you need in order to verify the account and start using it. And I checked, it's not in my spam folder. Later, I first tried to re-register but it won't accept the re-registration because it has the data from yesterday in the system. Then I tried the "forgot your password?" and they claim they sent a new password to my email address. But I did not receive it. Thanks!

Here in Finland, lelut24.fi sells it for €70. I ordered two and have now MODed them so that I have a 32x32 corner bike shop that is a modularized version of the original bike shop and a 16x32 bank, which is a modular version of the café. I decided to make it a bank instead because of the ATM that sort of stands out when it's right there on the facade. No interiors yet, but I'm actually really happy with the result.

My guesstimate seems to be correct. Lego.com shows €85 for Finland. However, while the price indeed is €70 for Germany and Austria, it is €75 for Spain and €80 for the Netherlands. I always thought Euroland prices were the same all over continental Europe. Also, the website shows they're out of stock already. :(