Lego City Park Hybrid "Fountain" and "Fun in the Park" Build

I have been very excited for the 60134 "Fun in the Park" set and the freebie 40221 Creator "Fountain" set this month, and am happy to report I finally got my hands on both!  I have been brainstorming ideas for how to combine these two sets into something more substantial that I could integrate into my City and Train Layout.

First off, I love the Fountain set.  The rebuild option for the statue gives you a variety of different combinations to create the perfect center piece for your park.  The fountain itself looks very good, plenty of detail, and both the benches are excellent quality.  I especially love the trash can with the grill pieces.  I do wish the flower pot was some other color than the neon green, but I swapped it out for a white one to better match my existing color schemes.

It is odd that the Fountain set is a "Creator" set meant to be paired with the Brick Bank Modular Building, even though the coloring and design seems to fit much better with the City themed Fun in the Park set.  The bench in the Park set is the same dark blue color and same basic design (just two studs wider) as the two that came in the Fountain set.

I wanted to make a city park that would fit comfortably on a normal sized base plate and that could be built along one of my Modular Building style streets.  I decided to use the longer bench and bus stop sign from the Park set to create a bus stop along the road in front of the Park.  I built a wall with entrance along the front of the park and partial walls going back part of the ways down the side.  I used masonry profile bricks for the walls and then built up pillars for the corners and ends with higher pillars forming the entrance up front.  Jumper plates were used to center the 1x wall between the 2x2 pillars.  I also used 1x1 tiles to texture the pillars.  All told I am pretty happy with it and its now integrated into my layout right next to the open spot for the next modular building!

New Purchases and Reviews!

I have been very excited for the Summer 2016 sets to come out and I have been a little frustrated by how hard it has been to get a hold of many of the sets.  I have found that only the new Star Wars sets seem to be available in Retail stores (other than Lego Stores and Toys R US, either of which I have in my area).  None of the Creator or City sets have made it onto the shelves.  I placed an order on Lego.com just a couple days after launch and found most of the sets sold out or otherwise unavailable.  

I wanted to take advantage of the free Creator Fountain set, so I placed an order for 31053 Treehouse Adventures, 60100 Airport Starter Set and 60101 Airport Cargo Plane.  The Lighthouse, Vacation Getaways and Fun in the Park were all sold out.  I wanted a couple Creator Fountains, and the first one I had was crushed pretty bad, so I built that one for my city layout and placed a second order for 60103 Airport Air Show.  The Creator Fountain came in pristine condition, so that one goes on the shelf to keep unopened.  

I am over hauling my Lego room to make better use of the space and to make it easier to work on the City and Train layout, so hopefully I will have more reviews and info coming soon!

Creator Set Review - 31053 Treehouse Adventures

The Summer 2016 Creator sets have been almost totally eclipsed by the truly excellent Vacation Getaways set, and I have to admit, when I first saw pictures of 31053 Treehouse Adventures, I was not impressed at all.  Already owning 31010 Treehouse from 2013, this set did not seem like an improvement at all.  Needless to say, after buying it and putting it together, I love it and think its far superior to the 2013 Treehouse!  Check out the video of the play features:

https://youtu.be/SgxsC9FrCyY

The set comes in a standard thin cardboard box that does its best to showcase the features and alternate builds.  Inside are a few non-numbered bags and three sets of instructions (one for each build) in a bag with no cardboard backing.  There are no stickers in this set.

Parts wise, there is a nice variety of parts and colors but not enough of anything to make it a good parts pack for any particular project.  There are a decent number of brown half arches/tree branches along with a couple other unique parts, only two small white windows, two brown fence sections, the printed map and cookie and a frog.  The only slightly rarer colors in the set are small quantities of dark green and dark reddish-brown.

The set comes with two minifigures, both kids with short legs.  A boy and a girl, both with dark brown hair and freckles.  The torsos are common ones but with appropriate and nicely done prints.  The minifigs come with a hammer, a paint roller, orange hat, cookie, map and a brick built squirt gun.  There is also a brick built cart for the kids to carry their stuff around in.

The build was delightful.  There are tons of extra details and hidden features that the box just cant do justice.  There are plenty of SNOT techniques and I liked the use of ball joints to give flexible, natural looking leaves to accent the structure.  The mechanism for dropping and raising the bridge/ladder works flawless and is very well done.  The set looks very natural and level of detail is impressive.  I also like that the play features in no way detract from the look and feel of the set.

The completed model looks great and is wonderful to play with.  The set looks solid from all angles and is hinged in the middle to allow it to be posed on a long front with the bridge up connecting the two trees, or it can be hinged closed for a more compact design with the bridge down as a ladder and the set looking more like a single big tree.  While both ways look great from most angles, I think it looks best opened up with the bridge up, but in this position the back is the weakest looking side.  When closed up, the ladder is not great looking, but the set looks better from all angles.

One thing that is hard to truly visualize until you build the set is how smooth the bridge feature works.  There is an angled technic arm hidden under one platform and on the other platform there is a very natural looking branch sticking out the back.  When you hinge the set closed, the branch activates the technic arm to lower the bridge.  When you open it back up, the action of the branch moving back out resets the arm and automatically raises the bridge.  It works perfectly every time, is very smooth, looks great and its nice that it does both the raising and lowering completely automatically.  There is also a hidden compartment in one of the tree trunks that you can store some of the accessories.  There are a number of other fun details, a well built yellow lawn chair, a nice brick built telescope, a yellow flag, brick built blue jay, small water fall covering the base hinge, two lanterns, a desk and a ladder leading from the main platform up to the roof were the telescope is.

A rope is also included that the kids can use to lift up supplies or the one tan (unpainted) board.  The board matches the size of the painted boards on the main room, so the idea is the kids can lift the unpainted board up, use the paint can and paint roller (which matches the paint color) to paint the board, then the included hammer can be used to attach it to the treehouse.

I absolutely love this set, it looks great, works great and my daughter has played with it for hours, all for a fairly low price of only $34.99.  I would highly recommend this set!