Building the Millennium Falcon

I am a Lego junkie.  It's not my fault. My parents gave me the first taste of the sweet plastic bliss when I was just a child. My parents were evil, they allowed my sisters to taste the sweet colorful drug too. With their help, my sisters and I amassed a large box of the dangerous little bricks.
I got away from the Lego for a while, Life and such got in the way. Then in early 2010 I saw the most amazing thing. Those Lego people knew how to push their stuff. It was a Lego Millennium Falcon. At the time it was the largest Lego set ever produced, 5,195 pieces and 33 inches long. I wanted it, and I would do anything to get it. For the rest of the year I schemed at how to come up with the $500 to buy it.
Around November I had just paid off another credit card and was itching to charge something cool. I went online to check the price and discovered to my horror that the set had been discontinued and the price had jumped to over $1,000. My soul was shattered. I was in ruins.
After a few weeks of non stop depression and hours a day of adult crying, I stumbled onto a website called Bricklink. It was a site where one could buy and sell individual Lego bricks. That's where I got my insane idea. Instead of buying the whole set, I would build my Falcon from parts.
I searched the internet hoping to find a poorly scanned pdr of the instructions, and found something even better. There were PDFs of instructions for every lego product even made on lego.com
I dug out a box of Lego that I had bought on Ebay a year earlier. It was a mix of all kinds of parts. I also pulled out a couple hundred bricks I would need for my Falcon, then figured out how to list them for sale on Bricklink and quickly got a couple of small orders. As money started coming in from my Bricklink sales, and a sudden burst of overtime at work, I started placing parts orders. The envelopes began to arrive in the mail.

And shortly afterwards, construction began.