Saying Hi.

bubbles2360

70 year old grandma here who is seriously and eternally addicted to building lego.  The modular Pet Shop got me started and since then I haven't stopped.  Most of my family think I've lost my marbles but the ones who really love me understand me completely and think it's cool.  I have ploughed through all of the Modular Buildings.  My ultimate goal is the Taj Mahal.  If anyone can give me some advice re sourcing good, clean white bricks at reasonable prices I would be grateful.  Buying the set outright is a no no.  Far too expensive.  And I think sourcing from scratch is much more fun.  Onwards and upwards.

LostInTranslation

Welcome Bubbles! 

You are most certainly in the right place to find people who understand an addiction to Lego :-) 

If you are looking for a place to buy bricks, I would recommend BrickLink, a Lego marketplace website with loads of sellers located all over the world. It also has a catalogue of set inventories so you can view e.g. the Taj Mahal parts list
https://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemInv.asp?S=10189-1 and then create a Wanted list, and then view stores that sell the parts you want, compare prices and quantities etc. 

The online Lego store also sells some parts via its Pick a Brick service (which can sometimes be cheaper than BrickLink, sometimes dearer, it depends on the part) and also via its Bricks and Pieces service (under Customer Service > Missing Parts > Buy Bricks). 
BrickLink sellers will offer older discontinued parts, but Lego direct will only sell parts that are currently in production. 

Hope that helps! 

bandit778

^ as a little addition to the above comment, it's always worth going through the instructions (available from the Lego website) to get accustomed to the build as you can change some of the colours of the internal building bricks to make the build cheaper.
A Good example is the yellow angled Technic brick (part 32555). The black version of the same brick can be had for as little as 0.88p on Bricklink whereas the yellow one can be £4 +
Also part 32324 in black - the Medium Stone Grey version can be had for as little as 0.16p but the black version can be £2.50 +
Building something this way can be a very rewarding experience and doesn't have to cost the earth with a little bit of patience.

Hope you have fun and welcome to the Forum.

Jenni

Also the Tower of Pisa Architecture set is a great source of the arches and round bricks, plus you get to build that first. The architecture studio set is worth looking at too, if only for all the headlight bricks.

Those are probably not the cheapest ways to get the bricks you need but if you think you'll enjoy the sets it's a good excuse :).

I'm occasionally picking up bricks to do this myself. By using Rebrickable I know that I have almost all of them but a fair few are in use right now :). 

Good luck!

MaffyD

Hello! Welcome to the forum. Can't add to the excellent advice already given, but wanted to greet anyway :-) Have fun on the site!

madforLEGO

bubbles2360 said:

70 year old grandma here who is seriously and eternally addicted to building lego.  The modular Pet Shop got me started and since then I haven't stopped.  Most of my family think I've lost my marbles but the ones who really love me understand me completely and think it's cool.  I have ploughed through all of the Modular Buildings.  My ultimate goal is the Taj Mahal.  If anyone can give me some advice re sourcing good, clean white bricks at reasonable prices I would be grateful.  Buying the set outright is a no no.  Far too expensive.  And I think sourcing from scratch is much more fun.  Onwards and upwards.

Hey, building with LEGO helps with keeping up dexterity in the hands! Welcome, and cool to see you got the Pet Shop, but this may lead you down the 'dark' path of wanting all the mods.

I think the previous comments already described the best way to source a specific color part, but thanks to now being three sites (bricklink.com, brickowl.com, and LEGO's PaB, or their parts direct site) you have a variety of places to look for parts, but it also means many time you may want to price compare between the sites.

As for buying the set outright vs buying the parts, it depends. IMO sometime you find that sourcing all the parts could be as expensive as buying a set that is complete, (maybe not for the Taj Mahal) especially if some of the parts for the set are super expensive, and then taking shipping into account from each person/site you are buying parts from).