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Lego - what do you do with it afterwards?
Hey there LEGO enthusiasts - wondering what you all do with kits after you build them? I really enjoy building LEGO (especially large complicated sets) but I don't want LEGO models taking over my house and getting dusty. What do you do?
If you don't want to put it on display, then three options I usually follow:
I've built my kid a ~3 meter (~9ft) shelf that we keep his most important/complex builds. At times, we need space for a new build and what usually happens is he picks one of the old builds that he no longer plays with and we take it apart and put all the pieces in a big container. It contains a mix of pieces from many different builds, and we use those pieces to create brand new stuff when we don't have any specific box set to make. We just randomly take pieces and build houses, vehicles, etc. Sky's the limit.
I know that there's no "right way" to play with toys, especially Lego, but I'm pretty sure that this is the right way to play with Lego, lol. That sounds like a blast!
To some of my "Lego puritan" acquaintances, this was blasphemy, lol. But we don't care. It's not like we had those expensive collectible sets anyway. Mostly Lego Mario, Lego Friends, etc. We love our vat of random parts that we can just pull from and build something new and unusual. The idea came from visiting a NYC public library once, that had a kiddie pool full of random Lego bricks in their playroom. The kids were having a blast inventing new things.
When I was younger, this is how I'd spend my hours. Haven't even seen any modern sets being talked about in this way, but it makes me wonder about all the possibilities. If I could only stop adulting just long enough to get deep into destroying sets, irrevocably mixing them in a giant bin and then building weird and wonderful new creations! Oh the places we could go
One really cool thing the a lot of modern sets have done is a sort of three-in-one approach, where each set comes with three sets of instructions. This lovely parrot is a great example of what I mean. So that's pretty cool I think, but not exactly what we're talking about I guess. BUT! The Lego Bonsai set actually encourages the builder to try swapping the leaves for whatever-the-heck, with some really cool examples!
honestly I would want to know too. I have the Lego Star Destroyer still sitting in it's box because after I build it, where do I store it? The thing is massive and display space is limited....
I mostly get rid of the boxes and put sets I want to build again in a bag. A single box can easily fit 6 or 7 big set that way. Like the Saturn V set. Love building that in tandem with the Lunar Lander. (maybe while watching First Man(2018) or Apollo 11 (2019))
I imagine building the Star Destroyer whilst watching/listening to the Original Trilogy would be great!
Oh man, I don't know if I could build anything while watching First Man. I'm too busy destroying boxes of Kleenex
I've got it in the box still - I plan to put it on a coffee or in a coffee table if I can (it might be too big to put in the glass coffee table like a lot of the UCS Falcons end up going into), or get one of the display stands that tilt it a bit and put it on a shelf.
My partner loves building Lego sets - they keep their favorites on display and break down the rest when they run out of room on our shelves. I've been helping them work on an inventory system where you sort everything by color/brick type and place it into bins or bags. That keeps everything tidy for the most part. Had to do some rearranging recently when they finished the Rivendell set - that one's taking up the top of a big shelf right now!
Rebrickable or other similar sites are great if you enjoy doing specific builds, but obviously you can be as creative as you'd like with Legos.
I used to run the lego storage reddit, so it makes me happy to hear about sorting systems. Have you ever seen the old evolution of Sorting post from lugnet?
I hadn't seen it, so I looked it up! Hopefully that's the right one.
Super entertaining read, and a good way to get an idea of what systems people tend to experiment with as their collection grows. I'd say my partner is at #16 or so. Their collection hasn't spilled into multiple rooms... Yet.
Yep, that's it. I see 707 in the url and I know exactly what it is
Hah, so spot on, reading through it. Thank you for this!
My mother is the main proprietor of our (me and my siblings) Lego collection which also includes her and her siblings collection dating to the 70's of last century. As soon as my nieces and (soon) nephew started to outgrow Duplo she made her spare bedroom a Lego room and the family collection has been significantly growing again as most new sets end up in my mother's apartment anyway (She's the de facto babysitter of the family).
Can't wait to let her read this :)
I built a shelf to display them. It’s a built in/floating shelf about 8 feet off the ground so the cats (hopefully) can’t get to it (so glad we have 10ft ceilings here).
How do you dust them?
I don’t 😂
But seriously the shelf has only been up a few weeks so far so I haven’t needed to yet. I probably will use a compressed air duster and handheld vacuum?
so be very gentle/careful with the compressed air dusters. Coming from someone who had to clean up dozens of lego pieces scattered all over the room after using an electric duster. :))
Good to know!
I use a set of specifically selected make-up brushes in various shapes to dust my dust-collecting sets.
I blow on it once, using my own, moist breath, then I use the brushes to wipe the rest off.
Works like a charm!
That’s a great idea!
I wait until they're horribly disgusting. I then take them apart, wash them in a bin of soapy water (except the sticker pieces), dry them over a few days, and rebuild.
Are we talking all the sets like even the behemoth ones? Or just the smaller ones? I might take apart my behemoth ones someday, but what an audiobook's worth that'll be.
I did the UCS X-Wing like this. Took a couple days, but it was worth it.
For me, It is either on display or stored. My son tends to keep star wars sets together, but everything else is shredded to use for more builds.
Yeah, I keep freshly-built sets in the living room for a short while. Then I disassemble them, some I put in bags for future fun, (I am looking forward to building all my modular buildings next christmas holiday.) others I sort out and add it to the bins.
It's in a sorted enough state to always find what I'm looking for pretty fast, so it's always available to build again.
But lately I've been getting more into designing my own builds and I like to have as much of my bricks available for that process.
I built my first huge set a couple years ago-- the Home Alone house -- and naively thought I'd just keep it up for the Holidays and take it apart afterwards, since I find it very meditative to just take them apart and rebuild them.
...nope, that sucker is too huge, no way I'm taking it apart again. So I just put it on top of our bookshelves (at eye level) and have since amassed several other sets essentially making a small town.... it's just gonna get bigger, I know it. So now we have to clear off all the space of our bookshelves' tops and just keep our Lego sets up there.
I clandestinely change their poses and get them into various scenes on a monthly basis/whenever I feel like it and wait for my spouse to notice before changing them again, telling little (mostly uneventful) stories. It just feels like a fun little activity.
Ah I am very tempted to try and get that set! I figure it can double as a Christmas decoration. It just looks way too fun to build, especially all of the details inside of the house.
Not gonna lie, it was a blast to build and I love it every time I look at it over the years. It's a one-two punch of nostalgia for me since I grew up watching Home Alone 1 & 2 every year and had tons of Lego sets.
Haha don’t make me face my addictions!
Most of my sets (UCS Star Wars mainly) just sit on shelves to be admired. Occasionally I play with them in secret 😂
All of them except the UCS B-Wing... I swear a piece will off that thing if I look at it wrong.
The Probe Droid is the same way - not a UCS set but definitely finicky to build. I love how it looks on display though!
Why is the most factual thing I’ve ever read ha ha the first UCS Star Destroyer too ha ha those floating body panels are so fragile
I have a shelf wall with them displayed, then any i get tired of or have a superior replacement go into the box that I let my kids play with.
We put it together and when it's no longer played with it's put into the general pool. We keep the manuals incase they ever want to build it again, but they'll have to do it the old school way.
Toss them in a bucket and build. Lego is more fun when you don't follow the instructions.
Im so old that I was playing with LEGO before there WAS such a thing as specific parts for a set. That was in the 60's. Just blocks, a few flat bases and red, blue, black, white or yellow blocks. Didnt stop me from building space ships and houses and cars or whatever, but everything got broken down after a few hours or days because I wanted the blocks for the next idea.
I was pretty pumped when they came out with axles and wheels, but by that time I had mostly moved onto Meccano and my LEGO rarely got used as I'd played with it so much that some of the pieces no longer stuck together. Thank you for coming to my old man's Kodachrome slide show.
Those old blocks my mom kept from her original sets in the seventies are still being used. They have to carefully be interspersed with newer blocks to maintain the stability of the structure they're used in but they're still a valuable asset to the collection.
And Meccano, we used to have that at school (late kindergarten?). That's a type of toy I haven't thought about for a long time. Those pulleys and leverages you had to screw together while making due with the limited amount of metal plates you had at hand. That's an itch Lego Technics never scratched for me.
The sets for the kids go in zip lockers with the manual up front, until they barely play with them - then they go in the big "everything together" box for their own projects. Then there is some very old Technics that go in a separate box. And then there are my sets, that the kids are allowed from time to time to rebuild - so surprisingly those sets go a long way in being on display. I find it easier to give them a quick rinse when rebuilding than cleaning in any other way.
I have very little space, so I leave mine up for a couple weeks to enjoy it then break it down and put it back in the box until the next time I'm in the LEGO mood. If I'm not a big fan of a particular kit, I'll pass it to a friend or donate it after I break it down, but most of them, I keep.
This is why I only collect the architecture series. They are relatively small final builds, but have very intricate details in the build process. To this day, my favorite Lego set to build was the San Francisco skyline. I have a decent number of architecture sets now, and they only take up a shelf or two.
Most of our display sets are also play sets (Princess Castle, Sesame Street, Friends Space Academy, a bunch of 3-in-1s at my office) with a couple art sets (Starry Night and the Great Wave) thrown in. The art ones are easy to dust, and the play ones get messed with enough that it isn’t a big deal.
I always end up selling for about 50% the ones I buy and build, but don’t end up capturing my heart enough, so to speak, to remain on display. Then we have like 4 bins of assembled play sets (DC Super Hero Girls, Friends, Mickey & Friends, soon to add Sonic in August) and a tool kit of sorted mostly or totally disassembled sets (Creator, IKEA set, Trolls sets, City stuff).
I’m also trying to stop buying LEGO, and that’s very challenging!
They go on display until something else gets built that I don't have room for, then get taken down and disassembled. I'll occasionally rebuild old models and cycle them through.
When I was a kid, I usually built the kit, played with it for a while and then disassembled it completely and used with other parts from other kits to make my own creations. I left some assembled though, like Police ship no. 6483. From time to time, I built the original kits again. That was like 1995 and what you call Lego classic these days. Then I got Technic and that was awesome! I got the Lego Technic briefcase no. 8062 and a few other sets, but they were very expensive for our family. Still I played with it building many different things and learned a lot about how things work. I must thank to my parents and grandparents next time I see them, as this is what kinda got me hardware experience (together with my woodworking kit for kids - chisels, saw, sanding paper etc.).
Nowadays I try to lead my kids into Lego so the also get to experience how things work. I bought Saturn V for myself which I now proudly display on my table in the living room. I might take it apart someday just to enjoy building it again.
So either display or take apart and free play.
One of my relatives buys (actually I buy for him) other people's plans for his kits so that he can build more models than the one Lego originally thought. For example Land Rover Defender no. 42110 is one such great kit that can be built into many many different models - the kit goes for like 180€, but if you spend a bit more on a few plans made by enthusiasts (and some are even free! thanks to all who make those plans and then just share them!), you can get like 6-8 different things out of it for total cost around 210-220€ and that means quite some hours of Lego building for you.
Display them, as stated everywhere else, or take them apart. If you take them apart you can either sell them, store them or play with them and make other stuff with the cool new pieces you got in your set.
If you do take them apart use the manual and work backwards. Take big chunks and store their pieces in numbered bags. That way you don’t have to go through every Lego you own to find that one piece you need to rebuild your 1500-piece set.
Also if you get extra parts for different sets bag and label them.
Oh, that's brilliant!
I have a lot of sets on a lot of shelves, and I dread the day I need to disassemble one of them to free up more space knowing I'll probably never reassemble it is it's scattered across all of my loose bricks.
We have 4 categories of sets in the house:
Eventually I'll give in and sort all their Lego with my old pieces, but it hasn't happened yet.
My 6 year old loves to build sets and then take them apart to make new creations. The only thing I'm insistent on is that they stay organized. We have varying degrees of success with that. It gets frustrating when things are disorganized because you wind up spending more time looking for pieces than building.
We keep all the instructions in a binder with various plastic sleeves/pouches.
I have a few sets and I keep them together on a shelf. Sometimes they come down for the kids to play with. Space is what keeps me from buying more. The kids would be pretty upset if Dad got rid of the Lego Voltron but I'd be content to sell some to fund new builds.
As a kid I would play with it for a bit and then the pieces would go into my general collection for building whatever
As an adult I keep a few nicer display sets set up and the rest are in the collection. Technic sets are especially good candidates for disassembly for me because the parts are suitable for mindstorms stuff