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hey all, thought i'd share my latest build...our LEGO room! so about a year ago I built a lego play area in our basement, which looked something like this... It wasn't much, but it was a start. it was a mostly color sorted system, but still like half of the bins were type sorted. I think it's a good method for kids or casual building, since sorting is a lot easier/faster and at the time it was 100x better than digging through a huge bin...but I soon realized type sorting was the only way to go. Since we were still getting settled into a new house and had an extra bedroom that wasn't getting used, I decided to annex it in the name of Lego. Here's the workbench part of the room and the view you see when walking in. I'm using a 10mm lens so this room looks bigger than it is, it's roughly an 11x11 room. we had an empty room to play with and after a year of pondering what we'd do with it, we decided a LEGO room would be the best use :) The workspaces are for my daughter and I, and the yellow chair is for my wife so she can hang out with us. All the storage bins are IKEA Trofast and I custom build the work bench on a frame of 2x4s and plywood with large trofast bins on each side. I was a bit worried the 7ft span in the middle would be too much but since one end is supported on the wall directly to the studs and the top is pretty solid, it is actually really sturdy. Here's a bottom view of the work bench, I added some 3/4 melamine panels to the back of the bins to stop the bins from going too far back and for adding some extra support for the workbench. Since I hate painting 2x4's I decided to face the front edge using some cut up grey baseplates i had that were partially damaged. I just cut them on a table saw and epoxied them on. I used bricks between them so assure they would be properly spaced and i'm sure someday we'll decorate them, but even as grey plates it looks good. Close up view of the front edge surface... Next up was lighting. The room has crappy lighting so I replaced the fan/light combo with a large ikea light and was going to hang ikea work lamps above the work bench, but then I realized it would obstruct the wall and be generally annoying. so I decided to wire up some LED strips I had left over from another project. These are warm white 3-chip LED flexible strips from superbrightled.com that i just adhered to some aluminum L channel. Then I cut more baseplate strips and epoxied them on to the L channel and then covered the entire L channel face with 2x yellow plates (only the already damaged baseplates were kraggled). The lights are 12V LEDs and draw about 1.2amp, so I used an old 3amp 12V converter I had laying around in my pile of converters then wired them to a toggle switch that mounted to this LEGO case. Here you can see the view underneath, I had to cut up some of the edging strips so the light could stay flush which was a PITA. Had I planned to do the LEDs before installing the bin frames I could have done that a bit cleaner. Using some left over L channel, a few screws and some 3M double sided tape I made this little 2x shelf for some of our favorite minifigs (i may need to make this longer :) My little corner, the Simpsons house and the modular are in for repairs... The space man decal was in the plan from the beginning, hence the red wall. here's the first two layers on, the extra squares are for registration. Here's the final decal. I made the illustration myself and used to sell these on etsy in a single color, but even though it was original artwork, the LEGO lawyers still objected to it so it's no longer for sale. :( Some of the small bin labels, it's so nice having a vinyl cutter. Here's a detail of the labels I made, I used this funny shape at the top to help me position the decals easily using the plastic supports in the bin's lip for alignment, it worked out great. Some of the small bin labels. I was a bit concerned about my choices for organization, I agonized over it for a long time, but it worked out pretty well. I have a few changes I'm going to make and I may do another small trofast set in the closet to handle some oddball groups like nacelles, and vertical wing/stabilizers. The one big mistake I made was forgetting about modified plates larger than 1x2. Not sure where those are going yet, for now they're in a loose bin in the closet. Here's the opposite wall which is mostly just straight bricks/plates/tiles. The trick with this side was that I only had room for 6 large bin frames and the small bin frames didn't exactly fit on top of that, so I modified one small bin frame so it was only 2 bins wide then used the cut off scraps to fill the gaps. Then I just covered the tops with some black melamine to make the top nice and usable. Here you can see the modified small bin frame. I also added a backer piece of melamine to keep the bins or bricks from falling back. The bins in this pic still have their old labels on from our first sort which was mixed sort with color/type. You can see how I made spacers from the cut off pieces of the shortened frame to fill the gaps between them. Some of the brick bins are a bit crowded, I may sort some out, or stack em to save space. I had a few PAB cups of some colors I stashed in the closet to keep the bin more manageable, for now they are ok. if they get too full I may go thru them and retire some of the scratched up bricks. My wife's contribution to the room, this awesome embroidery of the girl robot minifig... The closet is a pretty good size too and has some room for bins as well, definitely going to pick some up next time I'm at ikea... The big re-sort was pretty brutal, but seemed to go a lot faster than the previous sort, no doubt because a lot of types had been separated out... sorting the types from previously sorted-by-color piles as pretty soothing to the old OCD though... anwyay, that's it, hope you've enjoyed the pics!
