Restoring LEGO Castle 375

It was never complete.

At least I don’t remember it ever being complete. What I do remember is that something was always missing, and I would stare in wonder at the set of minifigs on the box, or as we called them when I was a child, the soldiers. I imagined what it would be like if I could arrange them exactly the way they were in the photo.

One foot soldier on every tower, with a spear, and the knights beside them with shields, each shield carrying different stickers.

Over the years we built it several times, but fewer and fewer pieces remained, especially from the figures. In the end I completely let it go, but the family kept the built castle, and you could always see the yellow LEGO castle somewhere in the apartment.

I no longer remember how it ended up with me. Most likely, during one of our Budapest moves, I simply took it with me. I do remember which apartment in Pest it was in, and where it stood. This was after 2010. Then in 2016, when we moved abroad, I said I was not leaving it behind. I took it apart and brought the pieces with me.

From then on, the remains lived in a bag, without minifigs. After we moved, I sat down one evening to see what was missing, but I got no further than realizing I would need to get a lot of pieces and stickers. And as for the soldiers, I really had no idea what to do. The whole thing felt too complicated, and so did running and managing the family.

But over the past five years, I started buying LEGO again. I don’t know why. I love browsing sets and planning what I should get. My first more serious purchase was the Space Shuttle Discovery, then a whole series of others followed. That was when I created the “what should we get Józsi for his birthday/Christmas” problem: LEGO or video games.

I started thinking about the castle again. I washed the bricks, then put them away, and again nothing happened for months. Every now and then I stumbled across them, and finally, I seriously started inventorying the bricks. I realized that, one way or another, I had about 80% of the bricks, but none of the minifigs or accessories.

I made an itemized inventory, then placed orders for the missing pieces on BrickLink. Shields, spears, minifigs, helmet visors. These are probably the hardest to get today. They are quite expensive.

It felt incredibly good to receive the packages little by little, as they trickled in, and to rebuild the yellow castle.

Of course, time had done its work on the bricks. They were hard to connect, and it was not the same pleasant experience as working with new LEGO. But for me, the thought that I was now going to build the original castle with every piece in place, from original, sun-faded bricks I actually owned, made all of that fade away. I tried to use the original pieces wherever I could. I even kept the tired, broken-in-half lower green base piece in the original build, as seen in the gallery above.

Little by little, the horses came together. These still had to be assembled from separate pieces. Three black ones, one white one. Then the stickers. Then the soldiers too. Every week I made a little progress. In the end, the whole castle came together.

Every helmet visor in place, every soldier in place. It was truly fantastic to see the whole thing together again. A process that had been left open in my brain for many, many decades finally closed. Now I can be at peace, because everything is all right.

I especially liked how kind the people are who sell LEGO in their spare time. Everyone was helpful and willing. You can tell we are all happy together, and we all suffer together too. LEGO means the same thing to everyone. In every package I received some sweet little card. People know what is happening on the other side.

In the longer term, I want to put the Castle 375 set, the yellow castle, into a glass display case, lock it with a key, and then swallow the key like in A Fish Called Wanda, because no jam-covered child’s hand may ever lay a paw on this thing.