I'm fairly new to my adult reintroduction of Lego, and this has meant i've had my beady little eyes on more of the larger more advanced sets to build, which inevitably has lead me to drool over some of the EOL more expensive sets available. And like a lot of people out there I can't justify paying (read: my wife won't let me pay) hundreds sometimes thousands on a set just to build it and break it down again (maybe display it if she thinks it's pretty and there's room).
So with budget in mind I started bricklinking 10221 Super Star Destroyer.
Now, apart from a few of the more expensive parts (I'm not bothering with minifigs) I've actually stayed fairly true to the original colours, but as I'm looking at the instructions (printed at work to keep the price down) and browsing bricklink, I'm realising that I could have substituted a lot more of the colours (for the bricks that aren't even visible) and kept the price down even further. Not only because a different colour would have been cheaper but also because I could have reduced the amount of stores I purchased from and thus reduced shipping costs.
I still have a few things to purchase but they're all very common cheap pieces but all-in-all I've managed to keep this build well under $400 ($200 when I tell the wife). If I had of read the instructions earlier and figured out which bricks don't show and could have been a different colour I think I could have got it down close to $300, when you compare this to the $550 I would have to pay for a used set on Ebay I'm pretty happy with the outcome (obviously this could change when everything arrives, I build it and get OCD about everything not being the exact right colour).
All this leads nicely into the inevitable question.
How many of you, that actually read this far down, would sacrifice targeted brick colours for the sole purpose of keeping the price of a set down just so that you can have the fun of building it? And I'm not talking about just buying the black masts for 10179, I'm thinking more along the lines of having the whole insides of it black if you knew that you couldn't tell by looking at the outside of it and it saving you half the buy price.
P.s. Since I doubt my wife will find this build very pretty, and she'll inevitably find out exactly how much I spent, I'm going to have a little foresight and ask if anyone would be interested in buying this after I'm done building it?