Lego Compatible Funwhole Lakeside Lodge FH9004 Building Set Review

Welcome back to It's Not Lego, my little space on the web that looks at all of the latest building block sets and brands coming out of China.

Today, we'll be doing a review of the Funwhole Lakeside Lodge, set number is FH9004 with 1969 pieces and it even includes a light kit standard with the building.

Now available on Amazon. Or you can purchase it directly from the Funwhole website.   Find my special code at the bottom of this blog post to get an extra 10% off their website pricing.

The Lakeside Lodge is reminiscent of a fishing lodge that sits on the water's edge. It has a main floor that consists of a cozy living room and well equipped kitchen.  There is a nice loft space on the second floor that accomodates a bedroom complete with fireplace.  

Funwhole is a relatively new building block brand that is making a mark in the Lego space. According to their website, they've been around since 2014 but only recently started to market building sets, focusing on unique design and innovation.  Unlike other brick brands, all of the Funwhole kits come with lighting included in the price of the set.

This is my second Funwhole set, the first being the rustic Wood Cabin set FH9001, which I had a lot of fun building.  You can find my review of it here.  I did an in-depth review of their lighting kit on the Wood Cabin set, so I won't be reviewing the lighting in this post.  Just know that the lighting kit in the Lakeside Lodge works the same way.

I want to point out that there are a lot of brick brands out there right now, but it all comes down to their customer service and whether they stand behind their product. I had some issues with my kit and Funwhole customer service came through with flying colours more than once! (We will discuss in detail later).

It's so great that Funwhole shipped me the Lakeside Lodge building set in the original box.  The presentation and the pictures on the box are really nice.

Also included is a very thick and detailed instruction manual, and a small sticker sheet.   

Additionally, there are four resealable envelopes that contain all the lighting components to make the Lakeside Lodge extra special.  

The large instruction manual makes it easy to follow the steps, but I will say however, it's sometimes difficult to ascertain the right colour of the pieces because there are different colours of browns, tans and greens in this set.  In that case, I usually take a stab at it and hope for the best.

The Lakeside Lodge has a standard 32x32 stud footprint but instead of one single baseplate the foundation is composed of 4 16x16 plates.  Although not required, I constructed a MILS base underneath to make the flooring more rigid and easier to handle.  This is something that I've started doing to all of my modular buildings, so it's not due to any deficiency of this set in particular.

To build the set, there are six major steps and there are six bags of parts pertaining to each step.  Within each of the large numbered bags, there were several smaller bags of parts.

As I started to build, I noticed that there was something odd about the bags of parts I had received in step 1.  There was a duplication of some bags and missing others which prevented me from continuing the build.  

I took pictures of the bags I had and contacted Funwhole customer service through an Instagram DM.  They were very quick to respond and we figured out which bags were missing from the set.

Here's a complete breakdown of the component bags by section that Funwhole sent to me.  I was missing bags 1.1-3 and 1.1-4.  Funwhole immediately shipped out the missing parts to me, and I received them right after the chinese Golden Week holiday.

With the missing bricks in hand, I started making progress again.  As you can see from the above picture, the Lakeside Lodge set is a building that is located next to the water's edge.  I added some of my own minifigures just for fun.  As a reminder, there are six steps to the construction and this completes section 1.  Time to move on to section 2.

And then just as I thought everything was smooth sailing, this happened.  It looks like one of the parts bag had a bad accident and several of the pieces inside suffered some damage.

I let Funwhole know and within a week and a half, I had replacement bricks sent to me, quickly and painlessly.  Needless to say, I was really pleased with Funwhole's communication and promptness.

With the completion of section 2, the main structure of the Lakeside Lodge is apparent.

The interior consists of two rooms, the kitchen and the living room.  The kitchen features two cooktops, a fan hood, a coffee maker, a sink and loads of cupboards.

 The living room sports  couch with side table, TV and grandfather clock.  Behind the couch one finds a rack with hat, jacket and boots.  There's a small foyer which leads to the front door of the lodge.

Before we move on to the second floor, now's a good time to test the lighting on the main floor.  There's some accent lights in the water and one on the fishing dock.

There's several more lights inside and outside of the lodge as well.

Funwhole provides a battery pack and all of the lights and wiring, you just need to supply two double AA batteries to power the lights.

Jumping ahead to section 3, we have now completed the second floor bedroom.  In addition to the single bed, there is a side table, a bookshelf and a chair and desk with lamp.  The red light brick in the middle of the room will serve as a fireplace in an upcoming step.

Here's how the Lakeside Lodge is shaping up before we move on to section 4.

Section 4 sees the completion of one side of the rooftop and dormer window.

A tree with colourful leaves rises from the ground.

Section 5 builds some more of the side roof panels.

Section 6 finishes off the roof and chimney.  And with that, the Lakeside Lodge is finished!   Time to take it all in.

I gotta say that this set really pops with the lighting.  Some bonus shots follow.

The Funwhole Lakeside Lodge does not come with any minifigures, but it sure brings life to the set if you add your own.

So in summary, the Funwhole Lakeside lodge is 1969 pieces and rated for ages 8 and above as per the box and manual information.  The set bundles in a great lighting kit that if purchased separately would probably cost at least $30 to $40 more. 

Funwhole uses the same lighting system as Briksmax.  For a detailed primer of how the lighting kits work, please check out my blog post here.

It comes with a sticker sheet (which I didn't use) and a really thick instruction manual.  Although there wasn't any page numbers, there were a total of 555 steps spread out over 6 sections.  Bonus tools include a brick separator and tweezers to pick up those small pieces.

I had some really bad luck in that my set was missing parts and also had deformed parts. But Funwhole made it right with their excellent communication and super quick replacement of the affected parts.

Want to add the Funwhole Lakeside Lodge FH9004 to your brick collection?  You can find it on Amazon. Or you can purchase it directly from the Funwhole website.

Because I've partnered with Funwhole, they are offering a further 10% off your purchase price by using code ITSNOTLEGO at checkout.   How great it that?

 Thanks for visiting and see you next time!  Bye!

Set Review: Keeppley K18003 Yinyi Garden Entertainment Building Block Set

It's huge, it's colourful, it's packed with details!  It's the new Keeppley K18003 Yinyi Garden Entertainment building block set.   Hey, brick fans, today we are back with another review and it's quite the set.

In case you are unfamiliar with the name, Keeppley is a building block brand that is part of the Enlighten Toys franchise. A quick scan on brick4.com reveals that they have produced just under 200 sets for such names such as Naruto, Pokemon, Doraemon,  Crayon Shin, and Hello Kitty to name a few.  If you see sets with the names Enlighten, Keeppely, and Qman, they are all part of the same brand.

A huge shout out to online store Afobrick.com who made this review possible by kindly furnishing the set for me to review.  The set was sent to me superfast and well packaged.  Afobrick.com has an excellent track record for packaging and delivery.

Afobrick.com also provides free worldwide shipping and it's all tax free. Buy more, save more!

The Keeppley K18003 Yinyi Garden Entertainment Center is now available on their website, and don't forget to use my discount code ITSNOTLEGO at checkout. (click on the pic below to go directly to the item listing).

In 2020, Keeppley  expanded into Chinese Street Architecture theme, with the  Kaiyun Hotpot Restaurant K18001, then shortly thereafter the Qiyun Luxury Hotel K18002.  

New for this year is the Yinyi Garden and Entertainment Center K18003. The Entertainment center consists of three storeys in an L shaped layout.  Where your normal modular building sits on a 32x32 stud baseplate, this one has a footprint of 36 by 42 studs.  If you want to fit this into your modular city, you might have to make some adjustments.  This is a decent sized set with well over 2000 pieces I'd imagine.

Typically, a modular building has a very interesting front facade, with a not so interesting backside.  The Keeppley entertainment center is an exception as both front and rear of the building are exquisitely and richly detailed.

Dominating the front corner of the building is a large sign board that runs the entire height of the three floors.  If someone knows the meaning of the characters on the sign, please let me know.  And yes, those are all printed parts, not stickers.

Here are some of the different exterior facades that adorn the three levels of the building.  More examples of printed pieces can be found.

Left side front view.

Right side front view.

Being a corner modular building, you can choose to display the side you like the best.

Here's the other side of the entertainment centre.  One can see a rooftop garden, a stone bridge that leads to a pagoda surrounded by water and a huge tree that overlooks a waterfall.   In the center of all this, there is a working glass elevator that services all three floors. It's a very nice setup, although one wonders where all that water is coming from.  

There's a bird perched in the tree, wish it was more colourful though.

The view of beautiful waterfall is obscured by the pagoda.

A better view of the waterfall with pagoda removed.

Shaded lookout from the second floor.

The full height glass elevator shaft. The elevator works by turning the blue knob at the top to raise and lower the platform inside.  There are openings from each floor to access the shaft, however there should be glass doors to prevent people from falling into the shaft and getting seriously injured.

I don't know if this applies to the other Keeppley buildings, but this one does not come off floor by floor like a regular modular building.  There are a couple of novel ways to view the interior of the entertainment centre.

Kitchen in a drawer!  This sliding feature makes it possible to remove the entire kitchen for extra play value.

With the kitchen fully removed, one can see all the details of the double stove, sink and other utensils.

On the other arm of the building, there are four different rooms to be seen by swinging away each section.  Unfortunately access is limited and is for viewing only.

Here is the main floor dining room, with seating for six.  Even inside there are printed signs on the wall and even the rice and noodle bowls are printed, not stickered.

I'm not exactly sure for sort of room this is on the second floor.  I'm guessing from the cups on the table that it's some sort of tea room, with different teas for tasting.

On the top floor is the mahjong room.  Mahjong is like a chinese version of gin rummy but using plastic tiles instead of cards.  Of course, there are a lot more complexities to this game than my simple explanation.  Anyways, mahjong can be found in many asian gambling establishments, typically frequented by the older generation.  And yes, all the colourful mahjong tiles are printed pieces.

One last look at the Mahjong room from an exterior view.

Finally for those of the less geriatric crowd, there is a video games room next to the mahjong room.

With a couple of controllers on the shelf and a dance mat on the floor, this should have the kids poppin.

So let's talk about the minifigures that come with this set.  There are six of them, three males and three females, all dressed in traditional chinese garments.

I'm pretty sure that Enlighten/Keeppley/Qman wanted to avoid Lego's wrath when it came to minifigure replicas.  So they made their minifigures with huge heads that look more like dolls than minifigures.   If you like them, then that's fine, but for me, I prefer all of my minifigures to look similar in size.  Xingbao and Sluban have uniquely designed minifigs as well, but they still keep within the same size norms as Lego style minifigures.  

But did you know that you can actually swap out the ginormous Enlighten heads and replace them with standard minifigure heads?  I went through my minifigure collection and selected some that loosely replicate the ones in the set.  

Which minifigure style do you prefer? Let me know if you prefer the Lego standard or the new Enlighten ones.  

As a final note, I took a lot of pictures as I built the set, but not sure if there's anyone interested in seeing the process.  Let me know if you want to see those pics and I can make a subsequent post.  I found the brick clutch and quality to be excellent.  There was a matter of  one missing piece and one deformed piece, however those did not impact the build.  There are some transparent window parts which are relatively clear and scuffed or scratched.

I gave this set a 4.8 out of 5 with points deducted for the missing and deformed parts and the big headed mini figures.  But overall a fun and enjoyable build.  And the entertainment center is absolutely photogenic.

Want to build this colourful and exquisite set?  Head on over to Afobrick.com and check out all the different brick sets they have at the store.

Hope you have enjoyed this review and let me know what you thought in the comments.   Bye for now!