Orders complete. Now the wait begins.

I wrapped up my parts ordering for Cafe Corner the other night. The first round of packages have already started trickling in, but I have around eight I'm waiting on. Of those, it looks like two will be delaying my project for a bit.

The first is a BrickLink order that has yet to be invoiced. The splash page says an 8-14 day processing time, which I assumed was a "worst case scenario" estimate. I guess I was wrong there.

The second problem is a Pick A Brick order I made to fill in the last parts. It's listed as "backordered" right now. I've never done PAB online before, so I have no idea if this is common. The order was placed over the weekend. I figure I can wait until at least a week has passed to inquire.

Thank goodness I still have a Town Hall sitting in the closet waiting to be built.

I have not run the final numbers yet, but it looks like the cost will come in at under $400. I've funded this project entirely by selling off other collectibles on ebay in the last month, since I've pretty much decided to focus my efforts on collecting LEGO. The good news is I have a lot of other collectibles to sell, so hopefully that will keep the bricks coming in for awhile.

While that cost sounds appealing compared to the $700+ a regular used CC runs right now, there is the factor that my set will not be a "pure" building. I have substitutions that were made for cost and availability reasons, namely the bley door and the window panels without side supports. As I talked about in previous posts, the door in good condition goes for well above what I'm willing to spend on a single element and the panels just are not widely available in the quantity or condition I need.

Also, I have not purchased instruction books for the set. I'm going to use the PDFs that are out there. I would love to have the actual books, but they are way out of the price range I'm willing to spend since the goal here was to get this set cheaper.

I'm building this set for me, not for resale, so I can live with these little variations. At this point, I'd say if you need to have the actual 100% legit and accurate set, you're going to be better off just buying a used/complete copy on ebay. The extra cost is going to be worth it in the end because some of these parts are just really frustrating to get your hands on. If you actually try to make a totally accurate and complete CC through sourcing, you might save $100 in the end. That's just not worth it, in my opinion.

For those who are happy with just have a near-accurate copy though, expect a post soon on how to go about unertaking the process of sourcing a 2,000+ piece set efficiently. Learn from my mistakes and benefit from my successes.