Couple makes life-size telephone box out half a million pieces of Lego

SWNS

A Lego-mad couple have spent more than 320 painstaking hours and half a million bricks creating an incredible life-sized telephone box in their living room,  Catherine Weightman, 60, and Mike Addis, 65, worked in four hour shifts over two months on the stunning eight foot high creation.  The realistic model is inspired by a telephone box in their garden and is the latest in their annual tradition of building a massive Lego creation in time for Christmas.  The couple will treat the telephone box like a Christmas decoration and will keep it in their living room in Huntingdon, Cambs,. until the festive period is over.  It took them around 324 hours to complete the phone box, as they started in the middle of September and finished on December 1.  Mike, a retired economics teacher, said: "People normally walk in and think it's part of the living room - then they realise what we've actually done.  "It looks very realistic considering it's Lego."  Incredible pictures show the Lego creation, which includes a telephone, a bird and a yellow pages book that have all been made from the construction toys  But Mike says the hardest thing about building it was making the roof of the phone booth and the fox.  He said: "There were different bits that were quite hard - the roof of the telephone box was quite difficult.   "Doing the fox was quite hard because it was quite delicate - it looks quite good as long as you don't touch it."  The grandparents started creating giant creations out of the toy bricks in their living room for their children around 31 years ago.  Over the years, their elaborate designs have including a 21ft replica of the old London Bridge, a life-size polar bear and an eight-foot Victorian dolls house.  It will take several months to be taken down so they invite groups of friends who have high-pressure jobs to break up the pieces of the toy bricks.  Catherine, who works for Natural England, said: "We treat it as a Christmas decoration and take it down after Christmas.   "It takes a whole party to remove it as it takes that long.   "We have to knock it down again and then put it into boxes, as there's so much of it."

Transcript

00:00 We've recreated the telephone box this year because we have, strange enough, we have a

00:08 telephone box in our garden and so we use that as the basis for the telephone box and

00:14 we went really old-fashioned with the old handset etc.

00:17 The worst bit really was doing the domed roof and trying to work out how to do that and

00:22 that was quite difficult so in the end we went for something that was much simpler but

00:28 probably not quite as accurate as a real-life model.

00:31 We don't use glue like the professionals do, we don't have metal armatures to support so

00:37 to build a Lego model this scale we built up a much more solid supportive wall so a

00:42 lot of the Lego you can't actually see because it's behind the scenes so to speak.

00:46 Yes, we had to do supporting structure behind but it's fairly sturdy.

00:55 I suppose one of the difficult things is the doors, we tried to make sure that the door

00:58 could move but it is very delicate, it's a lot of weight especially on the telephone

01:02 door and so whilst we can move it we have to be quite careful and the hinges are all

01:08 the way up the model and even the telephone itself you can actually dial, you can pick

01:12 up the handset as well so there are quite a few things that you can actually move and

01:17 use as in real life, you just have to be a bit more careful about it.

01:21 Our children are grown up now, they're all adults but they're always interested to see

01:26 what we've been doing but they generally keep away from us at this time of year because

01:31 they know if they come home they'll be roped into helping but we have got a few retired

01:36 friends now and they like to come and help and we hope our granddaughter who's only a

01:42 baby at the moment, she'll grow into liking Lego.

01:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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