This set was fun to build, and pretty straight-forward too. The pictures-only manual only led me astray once (the strangely fiddly hinges for the top of the tower, that didn't seem to line up at first...), and it's strangely addictive, as some parts were mystifying while being put together, and only made sense once you actually put them into the rest of the model.
I did have a couple of minor niggles: I was missing a piece! A single, one-piece block, that appeared in the instructions, but was absent from the set. It was for the base of one of the buttresses on the outside of the hall, and while I ended up with a couple of pieces among the extras I could have used, I didn't know at the time if they were needed for something else! There was another case of one of the pieces being a different color than the manual indicated, but that was it, apart from that, it all went together pretty nicely.
The finished model is wonderful, even if not all the bits seem built entirely to the same scale. The inclusion of 10 mini-figures means you can recreate most scenes from the films, even if getting Quirrel, but not Snape seems a bit odd. It's a little disappointing that there's only room for two of the four house banners to be hung up (though both are double-sided, so you can pick which ones you want to display), and it's not easy to reach inside the Hall once it's put together to get figures into it, but littler builders with smaller hands will have no problems.
Overall, a fun set to build, and display. My only real complaint was that I wish it was bigger, and more complete version of the Hogwarts Castle, but I'm not a Lego fanatic, so I could have missed that, or maybe it's coming in the future?
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