Saisons Café - DIY Book Nook Kit

This kit was so much fun to put together. The instructions were very clear and pieces fit together well. The stairs were a little tricky to put together but if you use supplied glue and let dry overnight it is just fine. Looks great on shelf!

I got Saisons Cafe from nookfan and put it together last week. Mini City has a great reputation, and I was hoping this new book nook would be fun to put together.It was not.Instead, it was like a house of cards, falling apart constantly. The amount of glue I had to use to keep it all together was insane for a book nook. I broke so many pieces, which needed to be put back together. I almost gave up and binned the entire thing after attempting the main staircase. I had to walk away before I used the tiny hammer to smash this project out of anger. When I finally got to the end, I attempted to put the last side and roof on, and the entire thing collapsed. That's when I literally glued every single thing into place, which again, with book nooks, you shouldn't have to do. Theoretically, that's what the tabs are for. The front piece is still wobbly. I don't know why they included the hammer, since every connection was so loose it was impossible to stay together without glue. I ended up hot-gluing the wires of the lower chandelier to the ceiling because the tape given to achieve this was laughable.Other things I noted that could have been done better:- The scale. Like a lot of kits, there were some items that were out of scale. The sofa was tiny, but the coffee table was huge, comparatively.- The windows are see-through, and when the light shines through them, you see the entire city of Paris. So naturally, these are covered by the back panel with zero light from behind, so that the beauty of the windows is completely lost.- The bunch of flowers you see in the vase is all the flowers I received. You are supposed to use that bunch to fill up both the out-of-scale oversized vase and the window box. If I had done that, everything would have looked sparse. I used my own flowers for the window box.- The lack of color. Aside from the flowers and sofa, everything is brown. So much brown. I used acrylic paints to give it a more vibrant look. For a cafe in Paris, this was a very bland colored kit.All in all, I'm very disappointed in both this kit and nookfan. I have several of their kits in my to-do pile, but I'm going to need to take some time so that I forget how frustrating this entire process was before I dive into another kit by this company.I'm giving this 3/5 stars, although it really only deserves 2. The extra star is because, at the end of it all, it looks very nice. I think most of that is due to my changes, and it is incredibly fragile and could fall apart at any moment, but it looks nice.

I absolutely loved doing this book nook. You should know- i m kinda a sucker for a good book nook or wooden puzzle. This one skyrocketed straight towards the top. I would say its within my top 5 favorites. I try to really make these last bc I never want it to be over... its like a love hate feeling when I finish one. But u know what feels WAY worse than finishing a bikk nook and realizing you won't have it to work on any more?? Its when u finally finish the build and ur about to take pretty little pics of it to show off how perfect everything was made and put together and u turn to grab something from your desk and your big old behind pushes the whole thing off of the table and slams down to the ground into like a bunch of different pieces. Yeah, that really doesn't feel very good.So that's obviously what happened to me here. I was so devastated but I managed to put most of it back together except for the cool little chandelier things but I just didn't have it in me to build them again and try to fix them on the ceiling... I don't know. Its jus too much. but anyways