In this era of anxiety and doubt, there’s nothing like a little retail therapy in the form of LEGO to shore up one’s spirits. 👍😎🤖 What a great inclusive Danish company! I found myself in an interesting situation as I was planning my next LEGO modular builds. 

I had just finished two MOC builds, although with LEGO is anyone ever really “finished”? Both MOCs were based on non-modular sets. I was enough into the process that I began to think about different things that my city was going to need and the lack of a school seemed like a problem that should be addressed. 

Alas of the 20 modular buildings LEGO has released since 2007, they’ve never released a modular school. Add to that, LEGO has this policy of “retiring” sets, Modular and non-modular, two to three years after release, so there’s usually only two or three modular set “available” at a time. And seeing that I’ve only been at this since last summer, I was well behind when it comes to the official sets that were released. Even the non-modular “school” sets had been retired. But then in December a YouTube video popped up in my feeds where the YouTuber took two non-Modular “Friends” sets, Heartlake City Community Center (41748), and modularized them into a cool colorful building. That looked like a great  candidate that could be made into a school. 

Hearlake Academy of Arts & Technology (V1)

Here’s version one of the school (image above). I added a playground to the left and used the circular slides that was originally supposed to go from the four floor to the yellow third floor and placed it in the playground. Knowing that the original community center set would “soon” retire and feeling like the school lacked things like a cafeteria, I recently decided to “expand” the school and bought two more sets, doubling the size of the school.

Hearlake Academy of Arts & Technology (V2)

Here’s version two of the school (image above). The playground shrunk a little bit to accommodate the increased width of the building. I also decided to eliminate the third floor balcony, moved the telescopes to the roof of the fifth floor, moved the gardens to the fourth floor balconies and kept the size of the fourth and fifth floor classrooms the original smaller size, so that the building wouldn’t be just one giant rectangular block. 

The second MOC that I just updated was originally going to be a small bookstore on the ground floor with an apartment on the second and third floors. I used another “Friends” set, Castle Bed and Breakfast (42638), as the basis for the building. I used a small 16×32 baseplate for the building and designed it so that it would back up to the stairs of the new Tudor Corner modular and that’s how one got up to the second floor. 

Castle Bookstore & Apartment (V1)

Here’s version one of the build (image above). I was pretty proud of the engineering that it took to resize the first floor so that the stairs of the Tudor Corner matched up with door to the apartment on the back to this building. I also needed to rotate to curved balcony and first floor wall so that it matched the other curved walls instead of pointing to the right. 

But as cute as it was, because of the small footprint and curved walls the downstairs bookstore was so tiny that there wasn’t room for a proper cash register, had room for only one comfy chair and only two bookshelves. And again, the combination of finding instructions on how to more than double the size of the building and inspired by the notion that the “Friends” set that this MOC was based on was eventually going to “retire,” I bought two more sets and the plans and created a proper Castle Bed and Breakfast building. Actually, the plans I bought were great, but because the designer limited himself to only using pieces in the sets, the design had no stairs or other means to get from floor to floor and the structural integrity of the building prevented one from being able to pop off the floors to see inside the building. So I created a version three with stairs going up all three floors and strengthened the walls so that one could pop off the floors without fear of accidentally disassembling the building. 

Here’s version three, from three different sides. 

So, my city is kind’a filling up. But I don’t have any police, fire or medical facility. Some of the buildings are multi-use with apartments on the upper floors, but I really don’t have nearly enough housing structures, like multistory New York style townhouses. I don’t have a grocery or general store. I have a Jazz club but no movie theater. 

I have a spot next door to the town hall for a police station/emergency center, but I don’t want to spend over $300 because LEGO retired the official set. Fortunately for me, LEGO does provide the official building instructions online for free and I’m hoping to adapt an unretired small Police set with parts from my inventory to see if I can’t come up with something to fill that need in my city. I’ve order parts to begin that experiment.

I found plans to a pharmacy/office structure that might work for a medical center that are based on using the current but soon to be retire Boutique Hotel (10297). After ordering parts for the build, I was looking at other things that could be built using the Boutique Hotel parts and found something that piqued my interest. One thing that I didn’t like about the pharmacy instructions is that it doesn’t seem to use the full 32×32 base plate and isn’t a very interesting looking building. 

Surprisingly, the building that got my attention was a multi-story church. I wouldn’t have looked twice at the plans, except that I could see how this church would make a great old-style single-screen movie theater with a balcony. It might turn out like my failed bookstore, but it looks really interesting, at least to me. I might even keep the pipe organ for “silent movie” nights or something. 

A police station and maybe movie theater are my next two builds. On the left side of the city, my residential area, I only have space for two more full 32×32 base plates and maybe two half 16×32 baseplates. On the right side of the city, the commercial zone, I only have space for one full 32×32 baseplate, that would be taken up by the movie theater, if I go through with those plans. There’s also room for four half-sized 16×32 base plates. I could move the updated Castle Bed & Breakfast to the residential side of the city, opening up a full 32×32 base plate on the commercial side. I might have to build high rise structures on both ends of the city to make up for the limited footprints available. The adventure continues.

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Tags: LEGO city, LECO MOC, LEGO Therapy, play, retired LEGO sets

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