A walk in the park

 When you think of Lego, you probably think of buildings (or vehicles), but a good city design has green space, and Totally Normal Town is no exception to this rule.

I'm quite pleased with how our central park turned out even though it's super simple -- full of trees and bushes and benches and paths that are all based on ones found in sets.

The one element that is my own original design is the fountain, which I'm quite proud of.

I think the carousel may have been inspired by a carousel from a set, but not a set that I bought. I don't remember how much of it is my own original design -- I just remember that I googled for ideas of small animals to make out of Legos for the kids to ride on.

It has a flamingo, a zebra, a sheep, and possibly a duck.

I'll include a few more pictures of the park below:

Our Totally Normal Apartment Building!

This apartment building is essentially my own design, but it was strongly inspired by a few different Creator sets.

The original inspiration was one of the b-side designs from set #5891 in which a square house has a top floor and a roof module that each lift off.

If you look at our apartment building in the original (pre-Grim) version of Totally Normal Town, you can see that it's just that set with one additional floor added.

For the 2019 build, I started with the same idea, but decided to make it look more like an apartment building than a weird, tall house.

The window trim and other decorative elements are largely inspired by the bike shop and café set #31026 (which you'll see more of later in this series).

I'll include some more pictures below so you can see the whole building, plus some pictures of a fruit and vegetable stand of my own design (which was also partially inspired by a tiny vegetable plot in the same bike shop and café set).

A Totally Normal Train Station

The Train station in Totally Normal Town isn't much to write home about. It's just the Winter Village train station set #10259 with some minor alterations:

1. I removed all of the snow and Christmas decorations to make it a Summer train station.

2. I changed the orientation of the tracks to make it fit better in its lot in Totally Normal Town.

3. I changed the names of the railway company and the destinations.

You can see that we used the acronym "SMCPTNT" throughout our railway system. This is a riff on the acronym of the French national railway system "SNCF" (la Société nationale des chemins de fer). Ours is "la Société municipale des chemins de plastique de Totally Normal Town."

The train is also a set: it's set #10254, the Winter Holiday Train. I think I did not buy this set (just built it from existing pieces from my collection) since there are a lot of substitutions -- notably I made the locomotive yellow instead of green.

I love trains and train travel, so I'm not super thrilled with how car-centric Lego cities tend to be. I only managed to include this one little train line to the magic portal in this incarnation of Totally Normal Town.

Maybe I'll succeed in integrating better public transit in the next round.

The candy shop is even less interesting -- it's just set #31077 with no alterations at all.

When I show this town to guests, I usually ask them which buildings they think are sets and which are my original designs. They rarely guess correctly.

As fun as that game is, though, I think I'll try to avoid including buildings that are just purchased sets in future iterations of this town.