LEGO Hogwarts Castle 4842

About 5 years ago my son received the LEGO Hogwarts Castle (4842) for Christmas. We promptly put it together and he enjoyed many hours of play. Over the years the castle was dismantled and the pieces made their way into our larger LEGO collection. I like keeping LEGO sets put together. I like free form building too so I buy mixed sets of LEGO for that very purpose. It was my son's set so it was up to him what he did with it.

Now that he is older he wishes that he had never dismantled the castle. We decided to make that a challenge. We keep all of the instruction books for our sets so we pulled out the books for the castle and dumped out our tub of LEGO. It looked like a daunting task.

We had a little bit of Spring break left and dove right in searching and sorting pieces. Luckily the castle used a specific tan and green color so those pieces were easy to find. It was all the browns and grays and specialty pieces that were harder.

I can't tell you how many times we looked through this pile. Each time we always found more pieces. With a little help from the wife and kids we completed it. It took about two weeks and we think we have about 90% of the original pieces. We ended up having to substitute other color pieces in some places. We are pretty happy with how it turned out.

When we originally got the castle we took a picture after we completed it. So we had to recreate the picture. Also there are some up close shots of the original build.