Our LEGO Room, Part 4

Time to wrap up the tour!  If you've visited us before, you know that we usually announce our building challenges on Friday, however we're going to postpone that until next Friday so we can wrap up our LEGO tour.

The final "wall" of our LEGO room runs along the stairwell, then there's a space which serves as the "main entrance", and then there's a half-wall separating our LEGO room from our TV room.  

It starts off with another bookcase of storage that has lots of neat buildings and a LEGO pirate ship I designed.

This is what the half wall looks like.  We put a lot of our short drawer units here and put a long wooden board across them to create a nice even surface.

On top of the wooden board we stacked some wire shelves and put a board on that to have an elevated shelf.  These are all just scraps of things we had laying around.  Next to it is a table that I used to use for scrapbooking.

These drawer units hold blocks.  There are a few big deep drawers that we use to hold those really large baseplates that are hard to store.

And that's the complete tour!  It's a really great space to work in, particularly when it's clean.  The only down side is that LEGO collections only get bigger, and so we keep having to find creative ways to use the space we have.  Maybe we've given you some ideas you can use.

In the future I was thinking I might post about the LEGO collection itself - our sets date back to the 1970s, although those are few in number (just what survived from my childhood).  The bulk of our collection is from the mid-1990s and later.  Still, I thought it might be neat to revisit some of the oldies but goodies that we have.  So stay tuned!

---

If you missed the beginning of the tour, this link will take you back to the first post.

Our LEGO Room, Part 3

This is the 3rd part in a four-part tour of our LEGO room.  If you missed the previous parts, you can find them here and here.

"Wall" #3 isn't really a wall.  It's a row of mismatched bookcases.  When we run out of room in the LEGO room, we move this wall back a few feet.

We've acquired these bookcases at different times from various places, mostly as hand-me-downs.  LEGOBoy loves Star Wars sets and hates to see any of them taken apart, so we needed a LOT of shelf space to keep them.  Someday when we finish the basement, we'll probably add shelving to the walls, but for now this is our solution.

After the last bookcase there's about 4 feet of space that allows access to the back part of the basement.

We also use the bookcases to hold our minifigures.  I have previously posted about how we store those.  If you missed it, you can read up on the wonders of the Scraponizers here.  They're sorted by theme and labeled so it's pretty easy to find what you're looking for.

Up on top of the bookcases there's just enough room to store LEGODad's Super Hero Statues, as well as some Hero Factory containers that I'm not sure why we're saving, but we are.

I do have to say that dusting off these shelves is a major pain, and doesn't get done as often as it should.  If anyone has any tips for keeping LEGOs dust-free, let me know!

That wraps up this installment.  One more wall to go!

Our LEGO Room, Part 2

As promised, our tour of our LEGO room continues today.  If you missed the first post, you can find it here.

Along the second wall of our LEGO room, we have a long stretch of storage units with pieces, pieces, and more pieces.

We use the tops of the storage units to hold constructed sets, bins of pieces to sort, boxes we want to keep...and once it gets too crowded, we start to disassemble things until everything has a home.

We've got three storage units that hold all different colors & styles of plates.  We have some in other places, too, but as much as possible, we try to keep parts that are similar near each other.

Below is the bookcase where we keep our instructions & catalogs.  We have all our instructions in plastic sleeves and sorted by number.  There's no more room for binders, so I guess that means we're done buying LEGOs...not.  We do have to find a place where we can put more binders, though.

The yellow grandfather clock is something we (LEGOMom & LEGODad) built a LONG time ago - in the B.K. (Before Kids) era.  We keep it together because if we didn't, we'd need a MUCH larger drawer for yellow blocks. :)  At the time, brown blocks weren't very common, and that's why we went with the yellow/red color scheme.  We left a hole in the clock face and bought a clock mechanism to fit through it, so the clock does actually work.  This piece has survived 2 moves, which is pretty impressive, considering it isn't glued together.  The dragon on top isn't part of the design.  He got crowded out of his old spot, so I perched him there, rather than disassemble him.

So that's the highlights of Wall #2.  Check back in 2 days for the next installment!

Our LEGO Room, Part 1

This is the first post taking you behind the scenes & into our LEGO room.  When your LEGO "hobby" moves into the LEGO "fanatic" and the LEGO "obsessive" phases, you have to have decent organizational skills to keep from winding up as the main feature on an episode of Hoarders :).

Fact:  We have a lot of LEGOs.  This is the result of roughly 20 years of collecting.  With a 7-year-old boy to use as an excuse, our collection has hit a rapid growth phase.  I thought you might like to see how we manage it.  I enjoy reading other posts about how other people store their LEGOs, and hope you'll enjoy finding out about our system.

Our LEGO room is located in the basement of our house.  I have a lot of pictures to share, so I've broken things up into separate posts.  Part 1 is going to feature one wall of our LEGO room.  By the time we get to Part 4, you will have taken the complete tour.

First are a few overview shots.  Most of our collection is stored in plastic drawer storage units of all different shapes and sizes.  They are manufactured by Iris.

We put two 6-foot folding tables next to each other to create one large, squarish building surface in the middle of the room.

And now some close-ups showing the nitty-gritty.  Actually, nothing is gritty.  We're very particular about taking good care of our LEGOs.  The first shot shows some of our nice large drawer units.  They're wide and pretty deep and good for holding big things.

On top, we've perched a couple of small drawer units to hold tiny things.

At the end of the line we put in this desk which gives a little more display space and allows for some short drawer units to be stored underneath.  I love the Death Star sets, but man, are they difficult to display.  They take up a ton of space, and you don't want to put them where an excited kid might knock them down!

So I hope you've enjoyed Part 1 of this four-part series.  I will aim to keep posting every 2 days until your tour is complete, so be sure to bookmark us and check back.  We also would love to hear from you - feel free to click on the About Us link to grab our email address and say hi!

Updated to Add:  Part 2 is now posted.  Click here to read the next installment.

One of My Favorite Things

Being an AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) has its pros and cons.  On the positive side, you have your own money and can buy whatever LEGOs you want, whenever you want.  This assumes you have an understanding spouse or significant other ;)  On the negative side, you end up with a whole lot of LEGOs, and you have to keep them somewhere.

I don't know if all AFOLs are neurotic or not, but I think it probably helps.  I can't imagine keeping our LEGOs in one monstrous, disorganized pile.  No, they must be sorted.  Some other time I might share pictures of what our LEGO room looks like.  (Yes, it's a room.  Sort of.)

For now, I'll share with you a product we found and love.  (I have no affiliation with this product or company.  I'm just a happy customer!)  We used to keep our minifigs in plastic bags sorted by theme.  It looked like this:

It did the job.  But those minifigs are just so darn cute, and it isn't much fun to look at them this way (and also not so easy to find that one character you're looking for).  Another one of my hobbies is scrapbooking, and that's how I found....the Scraponizer!

Scraponizers are these amazing 8.5" by 11" plastic cases.  You can get them with divided trays inside, like the one you see below.

The great part about these is that you can see everyone in there very easily, the Scraponizers are easy to stack on a shelf, and on the spine you can label them by theme.  Makes it super easy to find even one lowly mime amidst two dozen Crusaders.  (Not that the mime would be mixed in with the Crusaders.  *Shudder*.)

This certainly isn't the cheapest way to sort minifigs (especially when you have a ton), but it's very satisfying.  Searching around online I found a place to get them for about $4 apiece.  Warning:  If you try them, you may very well become addicted.  Especially if you are the sort of person who would never store a mime with Crusaders.

These cases are also child-friendly.  Our 7-year-old is able to look through the stack of Scraponizers and find exactly what he wants, instead of pestering us to find it for him.  We're still working on training him to put things away himself...

If you visit the Scraponizer website and look at their photo gallery you'll see pictures of them being used to store small LEGO collections.  And before we wrap this up, just a friendly reminder that we'll be back with Building Challenge #7 on Friday, so be sure to visit us then!