Pick the Bricks

I joined (all right, hosted) a LEGO photo swap. I thought I’d share the dedicated space for LEGO building now in my new house. I call it…

Technically, you cannot see the legs in the mini Legolas poster here. So, as my friend melydia says, it is literally a legless Legolas LEGO Loft. But that is just embarrassingly difficult to say sometimes. So let me show you around my Legolas LEGO Loft:

I’ve got two big cabinets for storing the containers of LEGO, hiding the mess and making it look neat. There’s a display cabinet to keep the dust off some pieces. There’s a nice building table where LEGO building doesn’t have to compete with crafting or any of my other projects. And there’s some nice bright lighting (and space to add more, as needed). There’s also a power strip under the table so I can watch movies on the laptop or iPad while I build. It took me a while to decide which posters I wanted displayed, but I figure I can change them out with others over time.

Under the table is storage for set instructions, organized by number.

I’ve got some of my LEGO books and guides here for reference, as well as a vampire minifig alarm clock so I don’t lose track of time while building.

Here’s the display cabinet with room to keep MOCs and sets I don’t want to take apart just yet. There’s also room to keep some works-in-progress dust-free and safe from the curious cat.

The insides of the cabinets. Yes, those are VHS tapes; I make no apologies for being a little old school and it’s the best place to store them. Otherwise, I have two cabinets just for LEGO (before, I had only one and lots overflowing, stacked on top and on the floor around the cabinet, making it impossible to open all the way. My bricks are sorted by type and color. There are bead-sorting containers of minifigs and accessories. There are drawers for plates of gray, dark gray, black, brown, blue, and green. There is a container of colored slopes, sorted into sections by colors. There are containers for storing minifig series by sets. There are containers of normal bricks by color and special bricks by color. There’s a container of town house items with sections for windows, doors, fencing, wheels, etc. There are containers for grass and for plants. There are containers for animals, one for castle bricks, one for Harry Potter items, one for transparent bricks, and much more. I also have a box of bricks that need to be sorted still. And there’s a little room to expand still.

As I get more LEGO, I end up needing to upgrade small containers to larger ones, so having a variety of containers is a little messy at times, but it allows me to pack bricks in very nicely and allows colors and types of bricks to grow as needed. The four boxes in the middle left are the ones I had when I was growing up. My entire LEGO collection could fit into those four containers, always organized by color. I still use them for organizing, but the collection has certainly expanded. But what about my sets?

Here they are! A few boxes I want to keep for alternate builds have been broken down and are stored in the larger boxes. But 95% of the pictured sets are new-in-box sets I haven’t assembled yet. They take up the bottom half of half of my bedroom closet.

And here is a shot of the loft from the living room below.

That’s my area!