Vee

I'd say you are VERY lucky, just look at your member number that you supposedly got unwittingly.

I bought a lot of white and some red bricks directly from PAB and more than a few of them arrived badly scratched (specially some flat tiles), not to mention some of them with sharp, not well trimmed edges. I was appalled by the low quality of some bricks. If I had received them from some BL vendor, I would be very suspicious but came directly from the manufacturer...

I have high hope that, with patience (weeks, months...), I will eventually buy it NEW for a reasonable price, like $100 or less. This period, Christmas, is the worst ever to try and win ebay auctions. I decided now to dedicate my time, energy and money to bricklink Ole Kirk's House, even if it is not a 32x32 baseplate house but it looks as big or bigger than the usual house on 32x32 baseplate. But I will not use red for the house AND roof, only for the roof. For the house I will use reddish brown since all the colors that I would rather use instead of reddish brown don't have all bricks available (or existent!). I really wanted DARK orange but that is beyond dreaming. I expect to bricklink mostly new parts and not to go over budget (US$140).

I have a different opinion. I care more about the exterior than interior. That is what I like about Café Corner, detailed and varied exterior, no time and money and bricks spent on the interior. My daughter just finished assembling Pet Shop, it has a wonderful interior, she and I were having fun looking at it, even showing it to my wife, all the nice ideas they put there, etc., but ultimately, I am buying and building the modulars for exposition, to become ornaments in my office, I am not going to play like a kid with it, so I will basically be looking at their exterior only, not interior, that is why I don't mind empty interiors as long as the exterior is nice. And about red roofs, in my country most roof _are_ red, not the bright red used by Legos but anyway red so when I look at a house with red roof I don't see any problem, I relate to the houses I know very easily. About replacing colors, last time I looked at what possibilities there was for replacing the roof of Café Corner (that uses new dark red in a part impossible to find) and the options were limited and I liked none, so I soon gave up about BL'ing it as much as I gave up BL's GG and MS. They lack too many parts and the options for replacement are few and I am tired of black, white, med. stone and dark stone grey. Nooooooooooooooo! :classic: Just kidding... I liked a lot the picture of Parisian Restaurant. It has a unique exterior, I like the colors (I am biased towards greens) and it is PARISIAN!

For the time being, I gave up on bricklink'ing 4956. My simulations showed me that I would be able to buy all pieces, including the two original doors, mostly new parts, for around $100, not less. With a little patience, and I have plenty, I should be able to buy the set from ebay for around the same value, all new parts, sealed set, without the hassle of multiple purchases from BL.

In Brazil, prices of Legos are also out of this world. Ex. Lego 42009 - retail price in US = $220, price in Brazil = R$1100 = ~US$ 460

I feel like a dumb for buying expensive sets, assembling them and wanting to keep them assembled forever. After I assemble a set (actually, my daughter does it most of the time), I feel bad about disassembling it because I find them pretty, after all, if I didn't, why would I have bought them! On the other side, once you keep them assembled forever, you can't use those thousands of bricks for anything else, they are there and you can't play with them anymore, sounds like a waste of opportunities to have fun, you can't try and create some MOC. The solution would be to buy sets just for parts and not assemble them but this sounds so weird to me and a financial exorbitance... Or buy individual parts via PAB or BL which can be expensive too. I told my daughter that now that we are going to soon have 6 or 7 houses (the 32x32 modern Lego house sets), I am thinking about having all of them disassembled and, with their parts, try to build a model based on our real house, with basement, all the rooms, back and front yard, elevation of the terrain, etc. Too bad our lot is anything but an easy rectangle and the terrain is not plain at all. A good challenge for a 1st timer! I will also soon have some modular buildings but they are meant to be permanent. My daughter yesterday just started assembling Pet Shop. Pretty stuff. Can't think of having it disassembled.

I am now a little more used to Brickficiency and I have a suggestion. There is already a way to blacklist a store. My suggestion is to add a "white list" in the same format of the blacklist. The application would look for a whitelist and, if it finds one, it would use ONLY the stores in the whitelist to compile all its possible combinations. What is the idea here? The idea is: when I run Brickficiency, almost never I am capable of getting results for 4 or more stores. I am always limited to 2-store solutions (that usually are not good) or 3-store solutions. 4-store solutions and up take longer than I am willing to wait (like ten, twenty or more hours...).But if you have rare parts in your wish list, because few vendors carry them, there are less combinations to test and so the chances of finding a 3-store solution become slim and Brickficiency will return nothing. Waiting for a 4 or more store solution, as said, takes too long. My idea is: I have my Wanted list, then I remove the pieces that are rare or too expensive, then I run Brickficiency on the remaining pieces. I get usually a bunch of useful 3-store solutions but since I have removed the rare and expensive parts, I still need to find some store for them. So, what I would do is to whitelist all the stores that are part of all 3-store solutions and add to the whitelist the stores that carry a reasonable price for the rare and too expensive parts (such research is done manually!). This way, the universe in which Bricklist would work on would consist of all those stores from its 3-store solutions (that I already know carry the best prices in general for the parts) added with the stores that carry the expensive parts. Brickficiency should then be able to quickly find a 4- or 5-store solutions that then have all the parts using only the whitelisted stores, even if not with the best prices per item but still very good prices overall.

@ Off the wall: according to my searches, there are 7 house sets since 2004 that use a 32x32 area. I don't know about older sets. I am starting in 2004 because the first house I bought was from 2004. And please, no, you should not turn your OCD/Completist disorder loose on it. Wait until I have them all _then_ you can turn. I don't like competition, drives prices higher. :classic: @Brandon Miller: I used Brickficiency and it found many "solutions" for 3 vendors and the prices I mentioned are the ones from these solutions. I later saw that the doors can be bought cheaper but then we need to consider the added cost of more vendors due to S&H; but, since they are expensive, even with S&H, it may be better to buy them alone or with a few other needed parts. I am still studying what is the best approach and if I really need to replace color to keep costs down. For 4 vendors, Brickficiency takes too long, I did not wait. Also, for some reason, one of the doors is substantially less expensive than the other (Café Corner again, certainly). And I should buy both of the same color. If one is too expensive, I will not buy the other too, even if more affordable. Exactly!

OK, thanks for the explanations. I was looking into your MOD and you used a trans-red panel 1x2x3, kind of a rare piece, not expensive, but rare, and so it makes Brickficiency's job tougher.

Honestly, before building CC, I would build GG and MS, in this order. I find GG the most beautiful set of the three, followed by MS. So, I am not BL'ing any of them but if one day I decide to do it, I will start with GG. I even bought the Haunted House and one of the reasons was that it is GREEN, beautiful green!

I don't have plans to bricklink CC or GG or MS. I did make some simulations with two of them in Bricklink some time ago but there are so many "rare" and, as such, expensive parts that they use that I decided to forget about it. Merchants are smarter than me, they know exactly how to price parts for these sets so that, in the end, you will pay near or more than if you buy the set at ebay unless you do the color substitutions but they were so many, so not worthy in my POV. I do want to bricklink house 4956 but I am not paying for those doors. I will stay away from the CC/GG/MS Lego fever. I chose other more-reasonably-priced Lego fevers... @Legogal: house 4956 is not tan, it is white, red roof, like house 4886. You may be talking about house 4954 that _is_ tan and also expensive, no interior, etc. But the 4954 I already had it before I decided to collect all 32x32 houses; I bought it back in 2007 for my daughters, when it was released, and it is 100% complete! I had doubts about spending time and money on 4956 because it is similar to 4886, but then I thought, what the heck, I will have it too, for completeness sake (= Lego fever! )

I never said you should not be strict about it, you should and I agree with the rule. My point was that IF someone created a 2nd account for the purpose of changing the nickname because there was no other way to do it (but it has, as you have posted, and it is explained in the rules) and IF this someone stopped completely to use the 1st account, then this someone would not be using multiple accounts and, in such case, banning her/him would then be "too strict", After all, the idea of the rule is to avoid someone with active multiple accounts, not to ban someone that happened to make an account with a bad choice of nickname and has no intention (supposedly) to keep more than one account, so I think. I see rules as laws. They are meant to be followed but under some circumstances it is acceptable to break them because the rules and the laws are COLD, they never take into consideration ALL nuances of what can happen. That is when a human needs to intervene and interpret the rule or the law and try to be fair. In this case, the situation had already a solution written in the rules...

Yes, I will try that, but I needed to vent my frustration over the phenomenon called CC (and GG and MS and ... what's next )

Welcome to the forum!

Regarding this post, about house 4956, I am thinking about bricklinking it so I downloaded the model to take a look a it, compare things and I ended up liking the mod that Calabar provides along with the original design. But I have some questions: - according to the BOM, Calabar uses 11 1x2 white bricks (that come with the set) plus 19 1x2 white bricks without pin. Is this an error or these "without pin" bricks are necessary instead of the regular bricks? Also, what is the use of a brick "without pin" that a regular brick could not do? - the same happens with 1x4 white bricks: he uses 21 regular bricks and 2 "without pin". - he uses extra 7 flat tile 1x2, engraved (code 59489), for the mod; is this correct? What is this "engraved" thing? And a question not related to this house: what is the difference between flat tiles with groove and without groove? What is this groove for? Thank you.

So I already know that I will not have Café Corner, that is ok, I have assimilated this fact. But then I decided to collect all houses Lego has created so far that use a 32x32 area. They are not too many, not expensive and I already have two of the most expensive ones. And I love houses! I am missing at the moment only two of them, the 5771 and the 4956. The 5771 can be bought new for around $95, no problem, but the 4956 is VERY expensive, considering what it is and its original retail value. So I decided to bricklink it (all others are from new sets) after all it is very similar to the 4886 (white house with red roof) and I would not care not have it from a new set, considering the current price. The estimate I have to bricklink it is around $110, not bad. But then, upon looking at its parts, just the two doors it uses are gonna cost me around $40 out of the total of $110! And do you know why? Because these damned doors are the ones used in Café Corner! Damn you Café Corner! I will have to use another color... no way I am paying $40 for two plastic miniature doors! I wonder if Lego is ever going to re-release CC, GG and MS... I am going to add them, as a "serious prank", to Cuusoo, and then see if I can get 10,000 supporters and make Lego consider re-releasing them. Well, I guess Lego will remove my entry and ban me from the site before my entry gets to the 2nd supporter... :classic:

You are only allowed one account at a time, right? How can anyone tell that I have created a second account if I stop using the 1st one and never use it again because I regret the choice I made for my nickname? I know you can tell by the IP address but first, if you do that, you are really a very strict forum owner, and one can always resort to the use of a VPN until the IP changes and you cannot relate anymore one account to the other... Don't worry, I am not doing that, I got the best nick ever for me...

Why don't you register again and forget about the previous registration?

Bethesda, MD (USA) - but I am Brazilian, not American. Well, South American...

Oh ok, you spend the money and keep the collectible card. $65 is 16% above retail value so, imo, it is fair, if you want it so much. I am spending some money buying some retired sets and I have established the limit of up to 50% above original retail price that I will pay for a NEW set that I want so much, so I am a bigger fool than you. (not considering that these resellers certainly bought them in the best time, with some big discount...) And considering that your card is worth $1000+, you are/were very smart actually! The sets I am buying are meant to lose money because I will open them, assemble them and so they will lose value.

You bought a $400 gift card for $465 and it is being sold at ebay for $1000+. I don't get it. What is it so special about this card?

They have been manufacturing Legos since I was born so they have a HUGE experience, today computers can help A LOT and do much of the dirty work, not to mention robotics that can replace us and do much better, etc., a once-designed-and-made set should be rather quickly to manufacture additional production, and also their product, being "just" plastic, is EXPENSIVE so they have the money too. I think they have just one word to guide their actions: "profit". Which, ultimately, is not wrong but can backfire. http://www.heaven4kids.dk/Leget%C3%B8j/Byggeklodser/LEGO-Technic-Grandprixracer-42000-1 Is this a sale? ~US$137, more expensive than at Lego Store.

Why LDD has so many missing parts, why LDD has a lot of collision problems, why Lego does not improve LDD in these areas (more than marginally)? They don't want us with a powerful tool or it is too costly to them?

Whoa, that is a nice set! You are lucky, at least the status on Lego site means that it is supposed to be back in stock. The important is not when you are going to get it but how much you are going to pay for it. As for your question, I guess no one knows unless someone here is an insider, in which case s/he would not tell us anyway.