See You In (my) Church

When I went to Sunday school many, many years ago, they taught us the little ditty “Here Is The Church” (… here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people). You’d make a church with your hands pressed together as you sang, raising the steeple by extending and touching the tips of your pointer fingers. Today, sixty-odd years later, those same hands will build a cathedral – Notre-Dame de Paris. Granted my church is made from LEGO blocks and the entire model will be smaller than a cornerstone of the real Notre-Dame, but at least the steeple is made from more than fingers.

So then, “Here Is The Cathedral”… in its purchased form. The cardboard box you see is not what I would call huge, but it’s an ample residence for 4,383 plastic pieces. These pieces dwell in thirty-four separate plastic bag communities, just begging to be liberated.  Buried underneath all these subdivisions (in the crypt, if you will) is the brick of an instruction manual, a veritable phone book of almost 300 pages. C’mon, you didn’t think we’d raise this cathedral in a single blog post, did you?

Mr. Instruction Manual could be called the mayor of this manufactured mess. He guides me on who gets together with who, when they get together, how they get together, and what it’s all supposed to look like as I go.  Mr. Manual has pages and pages of impressive illustrations (like this one), but also some LOL ones (like the one below). I mean, check out the upper left corner.  Am I really supposed to vigorously shake the bag out like that? The tiny residents will go running in all directions! We’re trying to create order from chaos here, people, not the other way around.

I expect all of the same challenges I encountered when I built the LEGO Grand Piano. I’ll think pieces are missing until somehow they appear right in front of me. I’ll connect pieces incorrectly and have to backtrack several steps to get them right. I’ll be left with extra pieces every now and then, and forever wonder if they were really “extra” or perhaps “overlooked”.  And I’ll police plastic piles around the meager real estate of my home office desk.  Maybe I require a shepherd’s crook or a bullhorn?  I mean, it’s me versus 4,383 others so you can see how one or two of them are bound to escape.

Here’s a thoughtful aspect of LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris, and oh-so appealing to the architect in me. The model will be built in the same chronological order as the original was (instead of, say, from the ground up). The first twenty years of Notre-Dame’s construction produced only the rounded east end you see here, which served by itself as a functioning church. The next twenty years generated the full footprint but without the roof, towers, and other noteworthy exterior elements.  The final sixty years brought everything across the finish line.  So I’ll be building the LEGO model in the same order, only in a hundred days (or less) instead of a hundred years.

10,000 piece tower

Before I snap Piece 1 onto Piece 2, let me dress down my many thousands of new plastic friends.  Together they comprise nowhere near the largest of the LEGO sets.  A model of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Castle is over 6,000 pieces.  The LEGO Star Wars Millennium Falcon is over 7,500 pieces.  LEGO Titanic (er, before it sank): 9,000 pieces.  And standing regally at the top of the LEGO podium (and just a twenty-minute bus ride from Notre-Dame de Paris): the Eiffel Tower, the only LEGO model to exceed 10,000 pieces.  To each of these top-tens I say non.  Notre-Dame will be challenge enough for this builder/blogger.

LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris – Update #1

Now that we’ve had the prelude (so to speak) it’s time for the church service to begin!  Bag #1 – of 34 bags of pieces – houses the first 100 or so of the little guys.  LEGO thoughtfully opted for a sub-community in Bag #1 for the tiniest of residents (some of which are just begging for tweezers).

chaos

Mr. Instruction Manual (who is multilingual by the way; he speaks English, French, and Spanish), warns me to “… avoid danger of suffocation by keeping this bag away from babies and children!”  Mr. Manual also wants me to know my thousand of pieces were manufactured in five different countries: Denmark (of course), Mexico, Hungary, China, and the Czech Republic.

danger

It’s fair to say I haven’t stood in the LEGO “pulpit” for awhile.  I snapped pieces together incorrectly at least three times today.  I also thought I was missing pieces twice, and I fretted over the fact I ended up with two leftovers.  Let’s hope our church service is smoother next week!  In the meantime, here is the build of Bag #1.  Not much to look at but at least it’s the foundation of the east end of the Cathedral.  In 1163 Pope Alexander III oversaw the first stone being set in place.  In 2025 nobody saw me do the same.

order

Bag #: 1

Running build time: 25:38. 

Total leftover pieces: 2

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Author: Dave

Five hundred posts would suggest I have something to say… This blog was born from a desire to elevate the English language, highlighting eloquent words from days gone by. The stories I share are snippets of life itself, and each comes with a bonus: a dusted-off word I hope you’ll go on to use more often. Read “Deutschland-ish Improvements” to learn about my backyard European wish list. Try “Slush Fun” for the throwback years of the 7-Eleven convenience store. Or drink in "Iced Coffee" to discover the plight of the rural French cafe. On the lighter side, read "Late Night Racquet Sports" for my adventures with our latest moth invasion. As Walt Whitman said, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Here then, my verse. Welcome to Life In A Word.

24 thoughts on “See You In (my) Church”

    1. The LEGO sets aren’t as organized as assemble-it-yourself IKEA furniture kits, but they’ve certainly done their homework to pay homage to the buildings they represent.

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  3. When you empty each bag, do you sort the bag’s contents by color before you start? I do, but some of the members of my family don’t. We decided that some of us conducted a more organized ‘search and rescue’ mission than others did…

    I’ve done seven of the Harry Potter sets now. 5716 pieces in total, but never more than 1000 pieces each! I am in awe of your ability to take on the really big sets!

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    1. The only sorting for me is to corral the pieces involved in the current step of the assembly before I begin that step. Otherwise it’s just a big pile of pieces, waiting to be tapped. Somewhat related, I discovered with the Grand Piano that LEGO stamps their logo on the bumps of some of their pieces. So it’s possible to assemble a piece correctly but with the LEGO logos upside-down. Who cares, right? The logos are hidden when all’s said and done. Still, I’m glad I didn’t notice them from the get-go or I might’ve gotten caught up in getting them right-side up.

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  4. Three hundred page manual! Yikes! I’m already frightened off this project. Thank goodness the pieces come in 36 separated bags. Could you imagine otherwise?! And super cool that you construct in order of the original builders. That’s a classy move, LEGO.

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  5. I got a good chuckle when you said “Two pieces were left over.” I imagined them being for the bottoms of the pews, people going to sit and falling to the ground. LOL… I know you aren’t there yet. They probably don’t have an alter or do they? This is EXCITING! No wonder you started this one first. The Eiffel Tower is 10,000 pieces. Baby steps, Dave… baby steps! Bravo on the Foundation.

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    1. Hey, good question about what’s inside the cathedral. I’ve been so focused on the structure itself I hadn’t thought about those details. Pretty sure I haven’t seen “parishioners” in the bags but maybe altar, pulpit, and pews? We shall see.

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  6. This Lego project demands dedication and you are the one to do it Dave. I like how you are following the original building plans as you go along. That is interesting to me and I hope you give us updates each week as you did in the past. For sure keeping it all together would be a challenge too – needless to say, you dust around your desk and likely your dog and granddaughter are off limits to your office. 🙂

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    1. Great point about our granddaughter, Linda. We have a baby gate across our stairs so she can’t get to any room on the second floor; an even smarter decision now that my office is full of LEGO chaos.

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      1. Yes, it’s so easy to lose one piece. My mom loved to do jigsaw puzzles and even though after she finished each one she just took it apart and put it back into its box, she always worried about losing pieces and not having the complete puzzle.

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  8. We tend to make Lego flowers, not buildings like you, oh ambitious one. We did look at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Castle and contemplate, but concluded that’d be too much for us. Pity though, it is cool. As will be your Notre Dame.

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    1. We gave our daughter (and our daughter-in-law) the LEGO Plum Orchid set for Christmas (a “mere” 300 pieces). My daughter struggles to keep real plants alive so I figured with LEGO she’d always have a pretty bloom around the house. Maybe she’ll get hooked on LEGO while she’s at it.

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  9. I do remember the “Here is the Church” ditty!

    We have never been ambitious or talented enough to try the most challenging Lego projects like Notre-Dame de Paris but we do have an extensive collection across two long tables and sprawling into nearby bookshelves in the Rec Room. Too bad we never figured out how to re-bag the pieces when displays get damaged by kids and grandkids who insist on playing with them! After many decades, we have accumulated huge tubs of loose pieces. Occasionally they are used for freestyle building.

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    1. Our granddaughter has a big tub of the oversized LEGO blocks, which commands her attention constantly. She loves building towers taller than she is. “Freestyle” is so much better for kids and their uninhibited imaginations!

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  10. You didn’t invite Pope Francis to attend your tearing-open-the-first-bag ceremony? Then I doubt he’ll come to the dedication.

    The 7000 piece Titanic kit is intriguing – I envision 2000 pieces for the ship and 7000 pieces for the Atlantic Ocean that surrounds it.

    Finally, will there be a way to fit the piano into the cathedral when you are finished? If not, we need to discuss a more universally compatible scale for their kits!

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    1. Oh my, you’ve come up with a great idea to pass on to to the good people at LEGO, J P: full-scale models. The more I think about it the more I’m surprised they’re not already out there for purchase. LEGO bricks as big as breadboxes, and what kid wouldn’t want to play inside of his LEGO creation, right? As for my Notre-Dame de Paris model scaling the same as the Grand Piano, I think I’d have to build it in my backyard. No room in my house would be nearly big enough!

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