Surprise Gift

So I'm unloading the boot of the car at COW and John A comes up and says "I saw something and I thought of you". (As a side bar, I've known John for 40+ years, and of the first people I met at COW back when I was a student he is one of the few left, and for some reason I can't recall he once gave me a lift home as we both lived in Sheffield at the time. He still does. Maybe he took me there as well as my car was off the road. Isn't memory a funny thing?)

Anyhow, John is a Charity Shop Genius, like Chris A. He's the sort of guy who just seems to find stuff that's useful. And he'd found this in one such shop in Sheffield.

It's one of those not-exactly-lego models you can get that come from China. AND it's a landmark building I don't have. He opens the box up and it has a carrier bag full of bits and a couple of unopened packets. Someone has had a go at starting the model and there's a few bits clipped together.

"They said its complete" he says.

Hmm. Yeah. You can tell?

"Oooh! That looks interesting" says I. "Thanks!"

When I got it home Mrs T and I sat down with it, and had a look.

Well, there's a lot of bits, and it is madness just to try and build it by scrabbling through the box. First job is to bag it up.

It took an hour or so, but we got it bagged up by "pips" on the bricks, plus some bags for the odd shaped bricks. 

Oh, and don't get the idea this is like standard Lego TM. Oh no. This is micro-lego. Here's some bits on a 2p piece.

I nearly bought a model from this range from Temu when I did my Chinese mini-house order. At this point I was thinking I'd dodged a bullet.

So...of we go. The first thing that is obvious is that the original owner couldn't follow the instructions. The plates put together are mixed colours, misunderstanding the conventions in the instruction booklet. If they'd ever finished it would have looked pretty weird.

It is really fiddly and it takes me a couple of days to get the bottom level finished.

Those little white "caps" between the fences give new meaning to the word fiddly.

The next level up brings in the colours, and to keep the angled pieces together uses "hinge" bricks. Hmm.

Ready for the first roof sections now. Made a rookie error here. I should have put the stickers on before putting the roof on.

I'd learned by this stage.

Here we are finished. I had one near disaster at the top when trying to align the roof and get the bricks to fit together properly, but I got it down.

It fits pretty well with my wooden puzzle buildings.

I'm not sure what use I'll get out of it, but it looks great.

Thanks John. You're a real friend.