Fully Assembled
Newsletter 2026-03-13
Rome wasn’t built in a day. According to ChatGPT, it was constructed over a long weekend. Work on this Lego Super Star Destroyer took a little longer than that. The final tally was 298 days, give or take a few hours on either end. Yes, that means what you think it does: The long, seemingly endless saga of my struggle against the big, gray wedge has finally ended. My family made it through all 1,418 steps of the instruction book and only had a not-suspicious number of pieces leftover. The Super Star Destroyer is completely and utterly done. Sort of.
It depends on your interpretation of “done.” If you mean “completed in perfect compliance with the instruction book,” I fell short; if you mean “no additional steps will be taken,” I nailed it. Like the Supreme Court, my actions were final not because they were infallible, but infallible only because they were final. No one will ever overrule my design decisions. Everyone is afraid to ever touch this ship again. To engage with it is to lose months of your life making backwards progress as it falls apart faster than you can put it back together. It’s not so much a toy as a generational curse. This set has vexed builders in my house from ages nine (back before Waffle had her birthday) to forty. Now that I think about it, I never checked the age recommendations on the box. I assume it said it was only suitable for people ages 99 and up. It should only be attempted if your two choices for entertainment are putting together this set or dying. Even then, death might be a better option.
That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed any of my time working on this ship. A few years ago, I lamented that I hadn’t built any Lego sets since I was a kid. After this, I’ve now spent more total hours playing with plastic blocks as an adult than I ever did in my youth. If the main purpose of a hobby is to kill time, then the Super Star Destroyer set might be the most successful product on the market. We did the first several hundred steps four separate times, not counting the smaller resets where something critical collapsed and we had to backtrack. Everyone in my family got in on the action. My four kids made the first two attempts on their own. I helped only with disassembling the set so they could start over from scratch between attempts one and two. I primarily handled the third and fourth attempts, with limited but critical assistance from my oldest daughter, Betsy. She helped attach the four huge surface panels as the entire structure tried to fall apart. Without her, I likely would have given up again, which is my go-to move for ending any project. Lola also helped with one panel and later took the ceremonial final steps: assembling a baby Star Destroyer, which was actually supposed to be an Imperial Class Star Destroyer, to show just how big the Super Star Destroyer is by comparison. Not that we needed anything for scale other than our own children.
Fully assembled, the ship is 4’4” long. If we stood it on its end, that’s only a few inches shorter than Waffle. Not that we could ever stand it up. If we tipped it, it would only be as tall as a 7,788-piece pile of rubble. We had originally planned to display the ship on top of the book shelves in the play room upstairs. Now that the set is fully assembled, that’s clearly impossible. The length is fine, but it’s too wide, unless we find some way to pose the vessel diagonally across the tops of two bookshelves positioned on either side of a corner. Even then, I’m not sure how I would get the set up that high. I would have to hold it steady while climbing a ladder. I’ve said many times that this set will be the death of me, but that might be how it could actually pull off my murder. If that’s how I go, remember that I died doing the thing I hate the most: actually finishing something.
There was no choir of angels when we attached the last piece. Nobody stood up and clapped. There was no medal ceremony. The kids didn’t even rush into the room to tell us we’d done a good job. They had been hyping me up over the final week as I put in late nights to get it done. They’d get excited whenever they saw a new attachment of random gray bits and would ask me how many bags of pieces I had left. But by the time Lola finished the baby ship, the kids were over it. Waffle was in the room, but only because she was bored and wanted to hang out with Lola. She was in the right place at the right time and got to be in the victory photo. Years from now, when I’ve forgotten the absurd amount of effort everyone put into this ship, I’ll look at this picture and think Waffle built it by herself. Good for her for accidentally stealing credit. Fortune favors the photogenic.
