The Papa Sheep: The LEGO Room

I loved LEGO when I was a child, and I was quite old when my collection was boxed up and consigned to the attic. After that I can't say that I thought about it very much until Samuel Sheep was gifted his very first LEGO in around 2010. It was this Buzz Lightyear set if you're interested, and it came along courtesy of Paul Circus. It wasn't immediate, but Samuel Sheep developed a deep appreciation of LEGO, and I was reinvigorated by the adult-themed sets which were becoming very popular at the time.

Fast forward to Spring this year and we have a bunch of models gathering dust (see below) and a huge pile of plastic boxes filled with LEGO. None of the little sheep could care less about LEGO at this point so I have been quietly establishing outright ownership.

I've always wanted to display some of my favorite models in the workshop/man cave, and now I have the cabinets I built here.

The only problem with this plan is that all the assembled models have a few - or quite a few - missing pieces. This is because the collection was never meant to be a work of art and has been extensively "played with." Still, if you're going to display something, it should be complete or close to complete. I've been around LEGO long enough to know that looking for a few particular pieces in a big collection is a futile operation.

It was obvious that if I was going to find the pieces I needed, some serious sorting out was required. What happened next is another excellent example of "project creep." After a whole week of sorting piles of LEGO in the evenings, while watching TV, I realized that (a) this was going to take quite a while and (b) I didn't know what I was going to do with all this neatly sorted LEGO. I had to go big or go home.

So, I went BIG. I moved the sorting area to a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood on top of the table saw, so I had plenty of space to work in and did not need to tidy up after myself in between bouts of sorting.

This....

...went on....

for days....

...luckily, I had help

Eventually I ended up with a pile of boxes in the basement, each of which was filled with many small plastic bags of individual parts.

Before all this started, the LEGO was stored at the lower section of what was our "games and puzzles closet" in the same plastic boxes. In future, this area will be known as the Lego Room.

The first step was to empty the closet of everything that isn't an IKEA shelving unit. Then I removed the middle 2x4 black unit and lowered the horizontal 1x4:

This is after taking the vertical 1x4 unit over to the workshop and converting it into a 1x3 which, thanks to careful measuring, is now exactly the same height as the two other units combined. The two (2) white cabinets were attached to the wall in preparation for the Big One; this configuration traps the black unit so it does not need fasteners.

I made a very swish countertop by slicing up the top panel from an old dining table and attached it to the cabinets with double-sided foam tape. This will make a very nice work surface and took less than ten minutes to cut and install. It also goes to prove that not everything has be glued and screwed.

Hung the first batch of parts cabinets and set the hardware for the ones that haven't been delivered yet.

While all this has been going on I have been considering how best to sort/classify the various LEGO parts. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I reached out to my bestest friend, the interwebs, and copied the hard work of The Brick Architect. This website includes an easy-to-follow labeling system which incorporates diagrams of every piece:

Self-adhesive labels can be cut out wit' tut sithers, an' stuck ontut parts ~~dooins~~ drawers:

Phase #1 is getting my sorted parts into correctly labelled drawers:

Phase #2 is organizing the drawers into the same order as the The Brick Architect's parts catalogue:

Plenty of distribution still to do:

I got a bunch of much larger drawers for the most common parts:

Some of the large drawers were subdivided to make the best use of space:

This is a couple of weeks later after the second batch of parts drawers have been hung. It was about now that I realized I was going to need more drawers.

Added two (2) more cabinets at each side of the closet for a total of 12, which gives me 576 of the small drawers and 72 of the larger ones at the bottom of the lower cabinets. I also have 18 of the really big drawers. It's worth noting that a lot of the smaller drawers contain two different parts, so I easily have more than 1000 different parts in my collection.

I basically got the last four cabinets for free because I was planning to buy this piece of artwork to hang in the LEGO room, and now I don't have room for it. Thus, the cabinets were paid for with money I had already mentally spent. Yay!