When I think about farms at Christmas, I always imagine a red barn covered in snow. It strikes me as funny, because growing up in Puerto Rico, our farms were every color under the sun… except for red. And of course, we didn’t have snow. Yet, Mr. Family Brick and I have always imagined adding a red LEGO Christmas Reindeer Barn to our build.
We’ve been thinking about this idea for a while. Back in 2015, I wrote about a winter farm LEGO Ideas submission that is just beautiful. At the time, we were still gathering our collection of bricks, so all those finishing pieces were beyond our reach. Now that we were finally ready and had bricks to spare, we realized that build was a bit too big for our village.
That’s when we shifted gears towards our red vision.
How the Idea for the Build Began
So as you look at these photos, let me start out with the obvious. There are no reindeer.
When we created this build, that was the goal of it all… a barn for all 8 reindeer, with their name plates at the top of their stalls. However, you know reindeer are hard to come by these days. You could get some in the older LEGO Creator Santas Workshop (10245) set, or you can get one in the new LEGO Elf Club House (10275). You can also Bricklink them, if desired. But they are not cheap anyway you look at it. We’ll have to save up for them or brick-build our own.
There’s also the fact that once we built the initial concept, Mr. Family Brick quickly realized it out-scaled our existing buildings. We had to remove 2 of the stalls and reduce the height of the build to match our winter village sets.
So, it’s no longer *truly* a reindeer barn, but who knows? We may add those stalls back in next year.
All in all, I think he actually rebuilt this barn 4 different times. It was a long two weeks. ;)
Details of our LEGO Christmas Reindeer Barn
As I already mentioned, Mr. Family Brick was the one who mainly brought this idea to life. He had a vision for a traditional red barn, with reindeer stalls, nameplates and lights.
But I had all the fun of adding a few details, like these adorable barn doors. I think I did a really good job with the details, don’t you?
Since we like to share our builds with our LUG, we also try and work on the interior details. For that, he created a build where the roof could easily be removed all in one piece. With this build, we didn’t use any of the usual 1×4 plates with 2 studs on them. He just made the roof have a lip that sits on top of the bottom of the build.
I probably should have taken a better picture of that, but I hope you’re kinda getting the idea.
The side and diagonal photos are where you can really see some of the details of the stalls. Future name plates and all.
And of course, we couldn’t create this build without adding some lighting! We knew we wanted to light up the “lanterns” on the outside of the build and then adding a little interior lighting as we could.
Since this is a MOC, there was no light kit for us to purchase. Fortunately, we had found a 12-Pack of 3.3ft 20 LED Fairy Lights on Amazon for insanely cheap! I think at the time they were only $11. Being 3.3ft, they were just the right size for what we wanted to do with our builds.
Since we had them handy sitting around, Mr. Family Brick cut off the battery box for one of the light strands and spliced it together with an old USB cable so we could connect these lights to the USB hub.
I should probably grab photos the next time he does that and create a tutorial. Do you think that would be helpful?
Oh and the back side of the build only has one attic window, similar to the front of the build. Just forgot to grab a picture, so… no pictures for joo!
And that’s it!
But Did You Copy This?
Well… not exactly.
In 2014, the Eurobrick forums ran their annual Expand the Winter Village Contest. For this contest, you basically create a build to compliment the winter village theme.
It appears that Mr. Family Brick and I ran across this build… independently… and it must have stuck in our minds. I had completely forgotten about this other build until I started prepping this post and did an image search on Google for “red barns”. That’s when the build appeared for me and it all came flashing back like a tidal wave.
We didn’t intend to copy, but subconsciously it seems we might have. While we create MOCs, we do realize we are always influenced by things we have seen previously. In Ecclesiastes 1:9, the bible says “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” So here we are, having “done again”. We hope 6kyubi6 sees it as a form of flattery.