Modified Lepin 15010 Parisian Restaurant Modular (Not Lego)

I bought my first Lepin 15010 Parisian Restaurant in 2016 and then bought another Lepin Parisian Restaurant in April 2017, because it was on sale.   It's since been built it and re-built it several times, and here's how it looks today.

The second Parisian restaurant is now the new home of a recording studio on the main floor and a music store on the second and third floors. 

Before we look inside, let's review the changes made to the exterior front facade from top to bottom.  The clamshells on the third floor never closed properly for me, so they have been replaced by round tiles.

On the second floor, the center doors have been replaced by another bank of windows.  My spare brick stash didn't have another arch so I just added some different detailing over the windows.

Leading from the first level to the second level, I changed the external staircase colour from brown to gray and bricked in the front windows.

On the back side, not much has changed on the third level, but the on the second level, the door has been relocated to the side of the building.  The veranda is still there sitting atop the enlarged first level.

The most major structural change is on the main floor, where the back wall swings open to reveal the interior of the recording studio.  Sorry, the yellow bricks above look really crappy due to different brick brands and quality.  Hope to change those out one day.

I designed the rear walls to swing open yet still have enough support to hold up the floors above.  The swing walls make it so much easier to access the interior spaces, if I need to move brick pieces around.  It helps for picture taking too.  The old restaurant's interior of kitchen and dining room are long gone.

Inside the recording studio, we've got a band with 2 guitarists, one on keyboards and another on drums.  The music sheets have butterflies on them because they come from a Friends set (fake lego of course).   Green hair girl does the vocals as evidenced by the microphone.

Here's a closer look at the drum set-up.  I googled Lego drum sets to get the inspiration for my own drum set.  Hopefully it looks acceptable.   Unfortunately it's hard to see the keyboardist in the back corner under the stairs.

The other side of the recording studio has a really annoyed sound engineer being disturbed by one of the members of the KISS band (maybe Peter Criss?) who decided to come over and hang out for the day.

Those uncomfortable chairs need to be replaced with a nice sofa set.   Gene and Ace agree.

The last member of the KISS band, Paul is outside donating money to the guy who's down on his luck.

A few days ago, the new music store had it's grand opening and here's all the peeps that showed up to check everything out.  On the second floor, I got rid of the murphy bed and fireplace and moved the door to the side wall.  New black and white flooring was added.  The music store has a piano, a selection of guitars (thanks Coco!), and a small set of drums.  I took out the front wall so it would photograph better.

With the front wall added back on, the music store feels really claustrophobic, but hey, the rent is cheap.

Here's a closer look at the drums for sale.

An upright piano at the far end of the store.

Surplus musical instruments are stored on the top floor, where the artist's studio used to be.

Well, that's it!  Please let me know what you think of the recording studio and music store.  What do you like or don't like and how can it be improved?   Let me know in the comments, thanks!

Just got 2 new Lepin sets: City Crane 02069 and Park People 02058

I'm going to be reviewing these two new Lepin sets soon.  The first is the Lepin 02058 Cities Park People building set and the second is the Lepin 02069 City Crane set.   I got both of these sets from Reddit seller Jeremy (not Aliexpress).   Stay tuned!

Keep on Trucking

Hey All, just wanted to do a little picture show today.  I have all these cool city and delivery vehicles which drive around Its-Not-Lego town to bring in supplies and keep the town clean.

This is the Enlighten brand Garbage Truck and Street Cleaner.  Model 1101.

Also by Enlighten, this nifty Ice Cream Truck. Model 1112.

An Express delivery truck by Enlighten.  Model 1119.

This tractor trailer is from Wange.  Model 40615.

This small delivery truck is from Kazi. Model 6093.

This super long truck and trailer is also by Wange.  Model 40616.

This utility truck is by Sluban.  It's from the Tower Crane set B0555.

And finally, the Lepin City Truck. Model 02036.

As you can see, I still have a few more reviews to do, so hopefully I will get to that soon.  Bye for now.

Hostel moves into not Lego Lepin 15002 Cafe Corner - Updates!

Last month, I showed you some changes I made to the main floor of the not Lego Lepin 15002 Cafe Corner.  If you recall, I turned the empty space into the new home of the Hsanhe Sweet Shop.   In this blog post, I will show you my modifications to the second and third floors of the Cafe Corner building.

Outside the building, there is this huge white and red sign that used to announce that there was a Hotel on the premises.  Unfortunately, the Lepin and Lego Cafe Corner buildings were never really furnished inside.  I thought about whether or not it was feasible to make a hotel inside the Cafe Corner building.  I have seen some excellent examples of other people being able to pull off the feat, but I thought that the building is too small to be a hotel.

I decided that it could house a Hostel instead of a Hotel.  You could simply just have some bunk beds and it could be really sparsely furnished.   So the first thing I did was to see if I could change the signage outside to say HOSTEL from HOTEL.   I needed to simply add an S to the word.  I had just enough red translucent bricks to make the S, but it was a challenge to figure out how to incorporate it into the existing sign.  After a few failed attempts, I finally made it work as you can see from the picture above.

When I posted the picture of my Hostel/Cafe Corner on Facebook, Rick Downell gave me the inspiration to incorporate a couple of backpacker minifigures.  I don't really have any nice ones, so I just kind of made some guys who looked like they might be hikers.

Here's the two guys coming to stay at the Hostel.

With their giant packs, let's hope the backpackers can make it into the stairwell leading to the Hostel which is located on the second and third floor of the Cafe Corner building.

Time to check in at the reception desk.  You can help yourself to free fruit, and drinks from the small fridge.  If you need to check the Internet, there's a computer desk too.

Lepin 15010 Parisian Restaurant: Not One But Two!

In May, I bought another Lepin Parisian Restaurant 15010 from Aliexpress because it was only $45 USD and that included shipping.  Normally this set costs around $65 to $70 USD due to the extra cost of DHL shipping.  The Aliexpress store/drop shipper got around the shipping costs by sending me the building blocks in two separate packages.  Each package only weighed around 1.5 Kg, so they could send it via China e-Packet service.  I think if packages are under 2 Kg, Aliexpress sellers can use e-Packet, otherwise anything heavier has to use DHL.

Surprisingly, I got all the parts for the Lepin Parisian Restaurant, but I had already decided that I wanted to modify the newer Parisian Restaurant.  Here is a list of the primary modifications I made to the most recent set:

1.  Reverse elevation
2.  Change the building colour
3.  Change the front entrance

I made other changes too, but I'll save all the good stuff and pics for a more detailed blog post, coming soon!

Hsanhe 6409-1 Sweet Shop moves into the Lepin 15002 Cafe Corner

My New improved Cafe Corner.

If you didn't know already, I have slowly been converting my Hsanhe branded mini modular building sets into full fledged modular buildings.  Of the original six building sets, I converted the Seven-Eleven convenience store, the KFC fast food restaurant, the Starbucks coffee shop and the Apple store.

Hsanhe Sweet Shop

I then set my sights on what to do with the Hsanhe Sweet Shop, pictured above.  I was originally thinking about just expanding the footprint by doubling the space, so I bought another Hsanhe Sweet Shop set with that plan in mind.   But the more I mulled it over, it just wasn't challenging enough because I had already executed this idea with the Seven Eleven store.

Also, the idea of adding a pink building into my Its-Not-Lego town (the Hsanhe Sweet shop is made up of mostly pink and flesh coloured bricks) didn't seem that appealing to me.

Cafe Corner before mods.

So instead of adding another new building to the town, I started to examine each of the existing modular buildings that already existed.  The first floor of the Lepin Cafe Corner  seemed like a very good candidate.  It was sitting empty and had enough floor space to accommodate the Sweet Shop expansion.

I didn't want to change the structure or layout of the Cafe Corner , so any changes I made would have to fit within the pre-existing space.  I started off by making a list of what I wanted to accomplish by merging the Hsanhe Sweet shop with the Lepin Cafe Corner.  Here's the list:

1.  Replace the existing black window frames with white ones

2.  Retain existing brick facade

3.  Remove the angular front door

4. Move store entrance to the side of the building

5. Retain the little tables and umbrellas

6. Retain the decorative element 

7. Retain the awnings

8.  Add a back door

9.  Retain the colour pallet of the Sweet Shop

Ok, so with that in mind, let's look at the improvements, starting with the exterior.  I was able to brighten the exterior of the Cafe Corner by replacing the first row of dark blue bricks with yellow ones.  Then I removed all the black window frames and replaced the with white ones.

Bake shop entrance.

You can see that I managed to keep the awnings and small tables.  The small tables were already yellow so fit into the exterior colour scheme nicely.  I chose the yellow colour because I think having a pink exterior for the Sweet Shop would have been too much of an eyesore.  Luckily Its Not Lego town has city ordinances to prohibit gaudy colours on building exteriors.  

The Lepin Cafe Corner initially had a swinging door on the side of the building, so I simply made it the new main entrance to the Sweet Shop.

Sheng Yuan Candy Shop.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the Cafe Corner modification was what to do with the corner where the front door used to be.  I tore out the door and the front steps and kind of left it empty being at a loss for what to do. 

Then it occurred to me, that I had just recently completed building the Sheng Yuan Friends little shops.  One of the shops had a rotating display.  I could put this in the corner space and put a curved window in front of it.  But then I discovered I needed more  rows of bricks below and above the curved window.  So that meant coming up with some curved bricks.

Winner Brand Ice Cream Shop.

This Winner Ice Cream shop set was sacrificed because it had all the parts I needed to complete the Cafe Corner mods.  It had the curved bricks and even a curved window with printed designs on it.  As a bonus I would take the door also because of the printed OPEN sign on it.  The bricks were more orange than yellow, but this is as good as it was going to get.

I thought I could use the curved white roof pieces from the Winner building, but I couldn't make them fit into the existing Cafe Corner facade without redesigning both of the awnings.

It turned out that the inside of the Winner Ice Cream shop had just the right piece I needed in the way of the blue curved countertop.  It fit nicely over the curved window.  My only gripe is that the colour is blue.  If it had been white, yellow or even pink, it might have integrated better into the Cafe Corner facade.  Oh well, beggars can't be choosers.

A closer look at all the newly added elements.  It's still a bit kludgy looking but I'll try to refine it a bit more in the future.

  I was still able to keep the decorative element above where the front door used to be and changed the mug to a cupcake.

Please feel free to try some of our free samples!

Ok, now that we have had a look at the outside of the new and improved Cafe Corner, let's move indoors shall we?

So here's the layout.  As you enter the store, there is a huge U shaped setup along the back of the shop displaying all of the sweets for sale.  All of these display cases come from the two Hsanhe Sweet Shop sets.  I forget where all the buns came from, but I did use one of the brown crates leftover from my Lepin Market Street building mod.

On the other side is another wall of baked items, including a display case for pies and cakes, and next to that a cash register.  You can see the little upright oven next to the rotating sweets display.

Against the window is the prep area.  There's a small sink and mixer and bowl.  Also a pan to make crepes.  Against the wall, we got a shelf for tall glasses and mugs if you want a milkshake.  Today's special milkshake flavour is banana.

As I mentioned earlier, I didn't want the whole Sweet shop establishment to be coloured pink, but I did want to preserve the some of it's history, so I put in a pink wall with the Sweet shop logo.  In that wall, there is a passageway that goes underneath the stair case which was unused space in the original Lepin Corner Cafe.  It can now be used to store stuff. 

It also leads to a new back door where presumably deliveries will be made.  In future I'll probably add an awning over the back door.

Here's one more look at the inside of the Sweet Shop.  The two store employee minifigures also come from the Hsanhe sets.

Apparently, Storm troopers have picked up the scent of the new sweet shop.  Prepare to be invaded!

Building Block sets used

Here is a list of the building sets I used for this mod.  I got them all off Aliexpress.

1.   Lepin Cafe Corner 15002 (knock-off of Lego Cafe Corner 10182)

2.  Hsanhe Sweet Shop 6409-1 (2 sets)

3. Sheng Yuan Friends Shop SY759A

4. Winner Ice Cream Shop 7031

Thanks for looking at my custom Corner Cafe building!  Bye for now.