They dismantled the set? I thought it was permenantly part of the town? Or did they just dismantle Lorelai's house or something...?
Depends on the set -- the exteriors -- Lorelai's house, Sookie's House, Miss Patty's Dance Hall, the SH town square -- INCLUDING Luke's Diner, the Dragonfly -- all are permanent sets of the type that they'll never be dismantled, only "redressed."
Keep in mind that certain sets would be dismantled *entirely* because whether or not the show was going to be back next year, these sets weren't going to be used again -- Yale interiors *and* exteriors, Logan's apartments, Rory and Paris's apartment. Just those three sets alone account for somewhere around 40-50% of the sets. So there was/is going to be a lot of dismantling anyway. I would not be surprised if it's these sets that people have witnessed being dismatled.
That leaves the interiors -- of Lor's house, the Gilmore Mansion, Luke's Apartment, the Dragonfly. just the stuff that would clearly still be used if the show returns. Even if they were dismantled, it's likely that every item that's reusable was simply returned to stock. They have blueprints, these sets can be rebuilt with minimal effort even if some items were destroyed -- remember, virtually all of these standing sets were actually built in Toronto for filming of the pilot *then* struck and rebuilt on the Warner Studio lot when Amy had the show moved to Burbank. And on sets like this that are really contemporary rather than period or SF/Fantasy, it's relatively cheap to rebuild a set or repaint an existing set back and forth (FTR, Cold Case and Without a Trace have painted and repainted variious buildings on the same "street" that Sookie's house is on on the Studio set numerous times. They're for the most part just facades.
IMO, as far as the concerns of set rebuilding, there couldn't be a more opportune time in the context of uncancelling the show. Fewer sets would actually have to be rebuilt than if it were cancelled and then uncancelled at the end of any other season except season 3, where the same opportunity presented itself with the destruction of the Independence and Rory graduating from Chilton.
Moreover, most of these sets that would still be needed would be easy to reconstruct from scratch -- everything but the Gilmore mansion itself are fairly simple, small sets -- the Gilmore Mansion would take some doing, but again, that's what blueprints are for and it's likely IMO that not much of the Mansion set would be destroyed. A lot of it is looks expensive enough or large enough that it would have to become part of the studio stock. So I think that the expense of restoring the sets would be minimal at best. And moreover, I think it would be likely that even if the interiors of every set that would be needed for next season were dismantled by now, Warner would likely be storing them temporarily in a *just in case* section. Several of the Friends setpieces that *weren't* being sent to the Smithsonian were even *still* in storage outside one of the soundstages several blocks away from the Friends soundstage when I took the tour in August 2004, after the end of that show.
IOW, rebuilding/reassembling the few existing permanent sets would be one of the cheapest and easiest things to do because so much of the exteriors are never going to be torn down and a substantial number of the rest of the sets were going to be struck and never used again anyway. So IMO, the state of the sets aren't an issue. Never were.
-- Rob
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Season 8: Because a studio is like an IKEA on steroids.
We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's best Gilmore Girls forum. The ORG Forum will be just that. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster. 
