By the time we get around to taking photos of the expansion of our LEGO winter village MOC, you’ll probably have seen all the photos of the new buildings. Regardless, I’m going to keep sharing, because we just have so much new. For this post, I’m going to show off Mr. Family Brick’s LEGO church build.
This is one of the things we’ve been wanting to add to our winter village. We keep putting it off, but this year, with the revamp of the baseplates to add lights, Mr. Family Brick took some time to build one.
Creating a church called for us to keep it relative in size to all the other builds already created by LEGO in the winter village theme. We struggled a little with it, but quickly found the right size for the build.
As for looking at the interior of the build, we have two ways you can do that. The main seating area opens up at the roof line. This is similar to many of the earlier winter village builds.
The other place it opens up at is the bell tower. It was built so that it hinges back, exposing the front gathering area in the church. There you can see our hanging flags and a little bit of our light wires peeking out.
Speaking of lights, one of the other things we wanted to do with this build was add lighting. We’ve been working a lot with light kits from a company called Game of Bricks to light official LEGO sets. This being a MOC, we had to go about it ourselves.
We found Walmart has a really great light strand available all year round that is fairly inexpensive. When we’re wanting to try out lighting a MOC, this is our go-to strand of lights. That’s what we used with this build.
There are several other details about this build that I personally love. I recently found our mini trees from the 2019 LEGO Harry Potter Advent Calendar (75964) and decided they would make a great entrance decoration.
Looking at this photo I see I missed adding a set of stairs to the door. I’ll be adding those this weekend.
I also love the bell tower he added. We’re not sure where we found this particular clock face. We do know it’s not official LEGO brand.
We definitely would have liked to use the clock face from the LEGO Creator Town Hall (10224). We have an extra one someplace due to a bulk lot we picked up. Instead we just went with what we had on hand.
Use what you’ve got, right?
My absolute favorite thing from the build is the stained glass window. We looked at a lot of different building styles for making the windows and settled with the most suitable solution for us.
We used cheese wedges to design our window. A piece of clear tape helped us keep them in place while designing. Once done, we found we didn’t need the tape at all, but left it to make sure the wedges would stay in place. You can read this tutorial on the Mosaic Bricks website to see how we went about creating our window.
Finally, you’re probably wondering what that cable is peeking out of our baseplate. One of the last things we did with this build was modify the light strand to work with a USB cable. We asked our neighbors if they would donate their extra cables sitting around in their homes. The request netted us about 15-20 spare USB cables, which we’ve put to a good, second-life use.
Mr. Family Brick then removed the battery packs from the lights and soldered together the lights and the USB cables. This will allow us to move away from the millions of batteries we have to carry with us to shows just to keep our display running. We’ll be able to use electricity and save money on batteries, too!
Love the lego church and stained glass. Beautiful! I’ve always wanted to attempt a church made out of legos. Now I’ve been re-inspired. Thanks!
Awesome! I love to hear that you are ready to tackle your own LEGO church. You’ll have to share photos with us when you’re done!