Building Central Perk
This year - as gift for the father’s day - I’ve received the beautiful Central Perk ~ LEGO 21319 set .
Being a fan of the TV serie, the gift was twice welcome, and I was looking forward very much to spend a couple of hours on it… but if I’ve been told that the opportunity to build it, would have been given me by the world-level spread of covid-19, I would have gladly declined it.
Anyway since we’re here, and have to stay at home, this gift helped us pass a couple of hours of great amusement.
Having started (again) from relatevely few time playing with LEGO, we don’t own many sets. Central Perk is our first set from the LEGO Ideas serie. I was quite impressed by the packaging.
The box opens like a coffers, and is decorated inside as well. Very nice! It contains seven smaller independent plastic bags. Honestly I didn’t understand why they were numbered until six, with the number one repeated twice 🤔. Chiara just didn’t care about such a small detail.
LEGO Ideas sets are products by LEGO of course, based on the idea of a fan. The manual of instructions is particularly rich, with information about Friends, the characters, and the human being(s) behind the product.
With the instructions on the table, it’s quite time to start the building. It’s not an easy one, and definetely not one suitable for children in the age of my doughter (6ys old)… and in fact Chiara didn’t help too much this time, but was very curious about the characters, and enjoyed the minifigures.
Speaking of minifigures, the set comes with seven minifigures; we’ve Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross of course, but there’s also Gunther, the guy who works at Central Perk, and is almost always in the background. Each one has at least one accessory from the serie: Chandler’s incredibly powerful - 🤣 - laptop being the most iconic at least to me. Monica is Chiara’s favorite minifigure, mostly for the haircut.
Straight to the build now! I can already anticipate you, there were a couple of interesting techniques, I’ve learned here for the first time. We’re going to focus more on this later.
Mistakes were been made. Can you spot the error?
It’s a small one, and passed unnoticed till very late in the building. Lucky me, it was not much effort to recover from it.
Below the solution…
The red hook, and the white tile plate should be inverted 🤦♂️.
Anyway, let’s continue with the building.
In the bags labelled with number two, we find the place to build the bartender work plane. There’s also a special piece with the Central Perk offerings. I really like that piece, cause I’m usually very bad with stickers.
Next, we built a different wall.
At this point you can still spot the large holes in the floor. We’re going to close the first hole using a LEGO made carpet.
I am not an expert by any means, but I found very interesting this approach, and something we’re going to adopt in the future for sure.
If you liked this, you’re going to appreciate even more the glass window with Central Perk logo.
Yes, it’s a door, with a transparent glass, positioned on its long side.
… and we’re going to use some special bricks to make it stands vertically. Very nice.
At this point we only have to open the last bag, and build the iconic couch, on which the protagonists of the serie spent most of their time.
The greatest thing here is that the couch can be easily removed from the set. I’m sure Chiara will appreciate this more and more in the next days.
So, this is finally the completed result:
We’ve really enjoyed building this set, and as a long time fan of the TV serie, I loved how lots of small details were introduced in this LEGO set.
For the future I really hope to see new developments on this subject.
