Agatheron

Sorry about that. I've just been using my iPhone for quick updates. I do have a photobooth for macro-photography, and my wife has a high-quality camera. Unfortunately we are moving soon, and the photo booth has been dismantled and put into storage. I'd like to do some higher quality pictures when I get the opportunity to do so. @Hinckley: Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try and make that happen. I'm hoping to get a start in on the 3rd floor tonight.

Well, good news! The final pieces arrived and I was able to finish of the first floor cake shop. Here's some pictures for your enjoyment. First a shot from the front: Next, an overhead shot looking towards the kitchen. Look for the card stand on the lower left: Looking the other way to the display area, including what is in the window: From the rear: And combined with the second floor apartment: I spend more time hunting through hundreds of little bags filled with pieces to find what I'm looking for than actually building. I suppose that's always the way. :) A couple things to note on this: 1. The flower bed on the front sidewalk is very finicky and did not go together well. Gravity is largely holding itself together. 2. The ceiling fans look cool, but I'm going to need to use some blu-tac to keep the fan blades in place. 3. The public garbage can out front was intended to sit loose on the tiles. I pulled up one tile and secured it down as a personal preference. 4. The lamp out front replaces a tree in the original design which I elected not to do. Well, actually, it's where the fire hydrant was supposed to go, and I put the fire hydrant where the tree was supposed to go. There is a tree that goes out back as well, and I will be doing that, but not until the whole thing is closer to being finished. Over the weekend I'll be working on the 3rd floor, and if I'm lucky I'll get to the roof.

I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I can't claim responsibility for the design. :) I may modify a few things, but I am merely building it. That having been said, I've had to modify a few small pieces like the BBQ which should have been built on a 2x4 plate, or the bed on the second floor. I'm hoping to tackle more of it soon.

I did look at the flower shop and the cake shop, and yes, the designs are nearly identical. The differences, of course, are brick colour - the flower shop uses 2 shades of blue instead of dark red and tan for the main colours. The roof is black rather than red. The TV Dish on the roof instead of solar panels. Oh yes, there's also the delivery truck. But the apartments in terms of layout and furnishings is very much the same. I got the impression that really they're simply two variations on the same design, and it is a matter of picking your preference. My six-year old likes to watch Cake Boss. Since the Cake Shop is reminiscent of the shop from the show, it tilted the balance in that direction of which plan I decided to get. Yes. You are absolutely right. This build is much more akin to my plastic scale sci-fi model builds. Right now, that's not a bad thing because my hobby table is packed away since our house is on the market. This at least helps me address my modelling fix.

I have an update with one level out of four fully completed. As I mentioned earlier, I started building the first apartment block floor (2nd floor) when I realized I was short of 1x6 Dark Red Bricks. So as I've been waiting for that shipment to arrive, I started working on other parts of the model. Here's a broad shot of how the first floor looks from the front: A couple interior shots of the living/sleeping area. This floor strikes me as a bachelor pad: I had made a mistake with the furniture. I had thought the sofa/chair combo was Dark Red. I was wrong, it was standard red, so I dismantled the dark red and replaced it with the much more lurid colours. Methinks said bachelor isn't quite so good with colour choices (at least according to my wife). :) You can also see the large screen TV and stereo speakers below the book/video shelf. That, and the ceiling fan. Admittedly, the ceiling fan doesn't hold together as well as I would like, but it looks nice. The left speaker does not have a nub to lock down on, so it flops around when I move this level. Anyway, a top-shot of the bathroom with the upgraded toilet, shower stall, sink, and bathroom tissue: The Kitchen: And the balcony with lounger and BBQ: There were a few things I left off for the moment. One is the hat-rack inside the apartment door. Second is a Red Bike that sits in the stairwell, along with a fancy plant. The kitchen also needs utensils hanging from the hooks above the stove. I have all of this, I just haven't done it yet. :) Instead of hunting for those parts, I'll wait for them to float to the top as I slowly deplete the massive number of pieces this thing has. Oops: forgot to show another overview shot:

Some more progress on the second floor, now with furniture (mostly) complete. One hitch was that the couch/seat pieces were missing some parts that I thought I had ordered. Oh well... they still work well. Here's a couple shots of how it all looks. The BBQ at the back needs a backsplash... but that is simply a matter of finding it as I continue to build. I am pretty sure that I can at least complete this level in terms of major construction. It's my weekend project. :)

Thanks for the feedback so far. Here's an update. Since I am waiting on more Dark Red 1x6 Bricks to complete the cake-shop level. I decided to start building the second floor, along with the bachelor pad. Here's a first look: Like the first floor, there is tile simulating hardwood, as well as tile for the staircase/entry and the bathroom. The toilet is swapping out the design in the plans and using the technique used for the Pet Shop. I prefer the Pet Shop's design instead. Beside the toilet is the base of what will be a shower stall. The apartments are all fully furnished, including beds, sofas, kitchens, stereos and tvs. They're coming soon. :)

Here's a picture of what the completed model will look like, minus the tree at the front: Here's the ebay listing of where I got the instructions: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Instruction-Lego-Modular-Cake-Shop-City-Custom-Building-/290594723919?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item43a8cb984f It's very nice design... but as I said 5800+ pieces!

Well... an update, but not much of one. With me realizing that I have no 1x6 dark red bricks, I have to wait for the next order to come in to work on the cake shop itself. However, my daughter wanted to do at least something on it, so we started building some of the cakes for the cake shop. Tonight we built 3 cakes and a card shelf. I've taken a few pictures to show how they look. In all there will be a total of six cakes in the cake shop, a rotating candy shelf (not built yet), another shelf with candy goodies on it, and a shelf stacked with greeting cards. Here's a closer shot of the white cake with pink cherries and the card shelf, which was (mostly) assembled by my six-year old daughter: I think just to keep moving on this, I may start building the second level while I wait for the last of the dark-red bricks... I'll be posting progress shots as I go...

Sikozu got it right. :) I don't have a picture update just yet as I have a meeting tonight and can't do more than a short reply. The last of my brick orders came in. I've tallied it all up and discovered that in the process there's a few omissions... not the least of which are 9 1x6 Dark Red Bricks which I need before I can proceed any further. Even so, I've completed the sidewalks, which are good, and I can go back and fill in some other detail that I've had to skip over while waiting for orders to come in. Once I do that, I'll post my progress pictures. The archway thing was pretty neat, but you're better to attach the cheese pieces to the 1x2 plates before fixing them to the underside of the archway. I think you could even add 2 more plate/cheese pieces to the 1x6 arches to make it fit. @Fishhead: The plan came with a complete parts list in a text-file format. I transferred the text file into Excel and developed a spreadsheet to track what I had ordered, and what I hadn't. Even so, I discovered today that as accurate as it was, it wasn't completely. :) I also had to make some substitutions, because some (small) parts it calls for either don't exist or weren't available. Tan flowers, for example, don't appear to exist, but they are called for on one of the cakes. So I'll have to do something different. :) Since I can't build any more of the cake shop itself until the 1x6 dark red bricks arrive, I may start building the 2nd level... or build up the cakes and card rack to go in the shop next. I plan to do my own substitutions on a few things. For example, the toilets in this plan are pretty basic... so I borrowed the design from the Pet shop to be included in the apartment Bathrooms of this piece. They take up the same footprint, so it seems that they'll fit just fine. :) Another example has a large tree out front. I'll swap it out for the more basic light standard as it will show off the detail on the front of the building more.

I've not put a dollar value on it yet, mostly because I've not tallied up the piecemeal Bricklink orders. I'd estimate that it's about $350-400 CDN in terms of the pieces that I've purchased through Bricklink. Some pieces are rare and so have a premium attached to them, others were very inexpensive to buy in bulk. There's also a Lego store near where I live, which happened to have pick a brick pieces that I needed, and grabbing fistfuls of those while my daughter helped herself helped greatly in that area. :) Either way, it's not cheap, and is comparable to buying one of the out of print modular kits on Ebay... but it has considerably more pieces...

Hi Everyone, My first post here... but I wanted to share something I am working on. I have both the Green Grocer and Fire Brigade Modular Kits which I have built and are now on display and sometimes where my 6-year old daughter can play with them. :) I do have plans to round out the collection with the Grand Emporium and Pet Shop, but before I did those, I wanted to try a non-standard design. I'm not brave enough to do a true MOC of my own, but I decided to purchase someone else's design off of eBay, and see how that would come together. This is a modular Cake Shop, and I have acquired pieces via (mostly) Bricklink. The detail level is considerably higher than even the well detailed modular kits, utilizing some 5800 pieces! I thought I'd share my progress pictures on it, although I can only go so far before I have to stop because of requiring pieces that haven't arrived yet. The design is a standard modular 32x32, with a shop on the first level, 2 apartment levels, and then a detailed roof level with a patio. Similar in many respects to the Green Grocer's design. I am currently lacking Dark Bluish Grey 2x2 Tiles, which haven't arrived yet, so the sidewalks in these pictures are clearly not finished. Here's how it started up: The right part is the Apartment entryway, the cake shop on the left. Grey and white tiles make up the floor design on the right, while longer red brown and brown tiles make a simulated hardwood floor on the right. The instructions had me build up the entry way first, rather than moving my way around the entire building. That's not necessarily a bad thing because I am still waiting on some dark red plates and bricks: A few interior shots of the apartment entry way including the post boxes: A day later, I was able to start building up the back wall and the kitchen, until I realized that 1x8 Dark Red plates hadn't arrived, so I had to stop... This includes a bakery kitchen that is about half-built. The first picture shows the shop from the back: A closer shot where you can see how the hardwood floor looks: And a close-up of the kitchen itself. The left side will be a bakery oven, while the right sink will include a faucet with controls. The stove in the middle is interesting in how it is built up in how some of the pieces are used: I wait by the mailbox for more pieces to arrive... I am not building the instructions completely as they arrived, I'm making a few modifications of my own to suit my own tastes, but since I am still fairly new to the modulars as a whole, I'm using this as a learning experience. Any feedback or thoughts?