My Police Station Building MOC using the King Brand Green Grocer - Part One

Hey all, welcome back to my Bricks and Figs blog, where I show you my latest MOCs and minifigures.   Today, I will be showing you my latest Lego style modular building, which is a Police Station for my Its-Not-Lego town.

Background

Its-Not-Lego town does not have a police station despite having two distinct law enforcement units, the regular policing division and the tactical division, shown above.

The mayor of Its-Not-Lego town wanted the new police station to address the needs of day to day policing, so a new building was commissioned.  Due to the town's budgetary constraints, it was decided that the new police station had to be stylish but economical to build. The town planners looked at various Lego style police buildings.

A lot of police station designs are based on the typical Lego blue and white building, however this style of building is too contemporary and wouldn't match the style of buildings found in Its-Not-Lego town.  So just meh.

The town planners also looked at other police station MOC buildings and got some great ideas.  Here's a few that captured their interest:

Top left - looks like this design is based on the fire brigade building
Top right - great design, but looks too cheerful to be a police station
Lower left- this design has Town Hall influences
Lower right - interesting corner build but might be limited on space

The Green Grocer

As it happened, Aliexpress was having it's mid-summer sale and one of the stores had the Green Grocer modular building on sale. Combined with store discounts and Aliexpress coupons, the Green Grocer cost worked out to be around $69 Cdn, shipped.

The Green Grocer modular is an iconic building with real the Lego version fetching for around $1000 CDN.  It's immediately recognizable and has a distinctive design.  To serve as a police station, the sand green bricks would need to be replaced with a colour more sombre, but not white, not blue, not gray, not black.  After narrowing down the choices, brown was picked as the colour of the new police station.

After waiting about 6 weeks, the Green Grocer modular building was finally delivered.  My first not Lego Green Grocer was made by Lepin, but this one is now made by King, the successor to now defunct Lepin.  The King branded Green Grocer set number is 84008 and to avoid custom issues in Europe, the instruction manual just has a black cover page.  Other than that, the rest of the instruction manual is identical to the Lego/Lepin version.

The King brand Green Grocer was constructed to inspect the build quality and make sure there were no missing pieces.

Its-Not-Lego city engineers came out to verify the structure was sound.  The interior would not need to be completed as the it would be gutted later, anyways.
Construction was put on hold for about a month as the delivery of the replacement bricks was delayed.

The Modifications

Finally, the replacement bricks arrived.  Here is the King Green Grocer with brown masonry bricks sitting next to the Lepin Green Grocer modular.  Side note:  The Lepin Green Grocer third floor windows were previously modified as was the turret roof height, in case you are wondering why it looks a tad different from the original.

For the Police Station proof of concept, only the bricks for the front facade were ordered.  Now having seen that the Green Grocer looks decent in brown, the more brown bricks would need to be ordered to completely replace the sand green.

 The demolition crew came in to dismantle the storefront.  The ladies in the crew just had their hair done, so no way they were going to mess it up with helmets.  Labour enforcement officials were generously "compensated"to keep quiet.

Just as progress was being made, the Its-Not-Lego town police chief felt that the original footprint of the Green Grocer modular was insufficient for this needs and requested the architects to increase the square footage.  All remaining walls need to be extended and reinforced and new baseplate sections need to be ordered as well as more bricks.  This project has officially gone off the rails!

What will happen to the new police station modular building?  Find out in Part Two!   Thanks for visiting and see you in the next post!  Bye!