The BrikWars Forums

Right. Time to make a confession. I'm 41. Yes, that makes me one of the older residents of the forums. I have a wife, a house, a FT job, and not a lot of free time as a result. I've also been collecting Lego since I was about 4 or so. My parents decided it was an educational toy - how lucky is THAT? Anyway, that's the reason why I tend to participate in forum events instead of posting my own builds. The benefit to owning a house? I have a room in the basement that is designated as the combination Game/Lego room. On the downside, it means I have to share the space with board games and my RPG books and supplies. But the room is mostly finished, has a gas fireplace built into one wall, and a table.

It also has these:





The wood framing for the plastic cases was built in my workshop. I also built the cabinet with the sliding white doors. All of those plastic cases in the first pic are full of Lego, sorted by type (and by color in some cases). Those cases are the kind with the internal bins that come out, so I can pull a bin from one case and a bin from another case and move them around as needed. There aren't a lot of empty spaces in those cases. I have one such case JUST for wheels.
The second and third pics are my "cabinets" for finished builds. The box with the white sliding doors currently has unsorted Lego in spare bins and a bunch of the minifigs I've acquired mounted on spare baseplates. The books under that cabinet are all RPG books for various systems. The pic with the Pirate ships is actually a closet. I get the top half for builds. The bottom half is full of board games.

The fourth pic is my minifig bits. NO I AM NOT JOKING! Each of those plastic cases holds four 9x11 sorting trays. Add the nine stacked on top and that makes 29 such bins. I could easily fine-sort that stuff into another dozen such trays.



Most of those trays are pretty full, as you can see here. This tray is JUST torsos, and mostly City-themed ones at that! Most of my collection is actually Castle/Pirate themed, as I use the minifigs on gaming nights to represent the players AND some of the monsters. I've got a bin in one of those sorting trays JUST for zombie heads.

WHY am I posting this? Simple. After being in the house for 6 years, I'm FINALLY getting the yardwork and repairs to a level where I MIGHT, just MIGHT have some free time to actually BUILD something finally!

Yes, it will likely be Medievo-style, but not necessarily in that SETTING...

A lovely set up, sir.

I may be young and naive but I am finding time to build in between all my new house setting up tasks, so there is hope yet for you, old man.

Honestly, it wouldn't have been so bad if not for two issues. The previous owner of the house went blind 4 years before he passed, but that didn't stop him from working in his yard or on the house. When we moved in, the entire yard had a three-foot spaced grid of plastic, wooden, and metal poles with notches in them. The previous owner used them to get around the yard and work on his garden. Alas, that didn't stop him from planting tulips INSIDE of shrubs, blackberry bushes smack in the middle of his ornamental groundcover, and so forth. Likewise, I've had to, um, UN-fix a lot of the stuff he did INSIDE the house, along with my "honey-do" list. We've turned the dining room into a library for example, with shelving I built myself from dimensional lumber. That game room? I had to rip out moldy carpeting, remove the cracked VCT tiles under THAT, try to clean the tempera powder paints off of the concrete (that failed, btw), and finally dumped cheap concrete paint on the floor and covered it with sheet laminate.

Really, I'm just glad the wife is okay with my Lego collection! She's a gamer like me, and regularly takes part in our semi-weekly gaming sessions.

You might be a bit older than Mike.

Tzan wrote:You might be a bit older than Mike.

^o0^ I might be older than Stubby? Should this worry me?

I don't think so, Mike is mostly harmless now.

Oh yeah, sorting/storing Lego can be super annoying. I don't have much space or money, so I just sort the stuff by category (and sometimes color) and put it in dozens of gallon zip lock bags, then stuff those into a big plastic tub.

I just finished sorting my lego into zip locks by type. Now I have to figure out a good system to find the right zip lock without digging through a giant bin.

I just have about 3 boxes of bricks, a tall and thin chest of drwers full of vehicles and a smaller one full of minifigs.

Falk wrote:I just finished sorting my lego into zip locks by type. Now I have to figure out a good system to find the right zip lock without digging through a giant bin.

........

I have to confess, that was my sorting system back in High School. Hell, I STILL use that method for some parts! The nice thing about being an adult is having the money to tinker with new ways to sort my bricks! I hit upon this method about a decade ago, and lucky for me they haven't changed the styles on those big plastic cases i'm using in that time! The COLOR has changed a few times, but not the style.

I haven't been so lucky on the smaller sorting trays. Those DID change style a few times, and the dividers for one type don't fit the other. I've got a plastic storage tub JUST for spare dividers for those trays. To make matters worse, I could use another dozen of them, but the manufacturer changed the style AGAIN about two months ago. The new trays are NOTHING like the old ones, so I need to find another source for trays.

Oh, as a piece of advice, if you have OCD like I do, don't start fine-sorting your Lego. Most of the time when I'm tinkering with my collection, I'm just letting my OCD out to play as I sort my dwindling piles of unsorted bricks and parts.

Can't wait to hopefully see some builds from you Scribonious!