What to Do With Minifigures? A Home Made Minifigure Display Solution!

If you've been reading this blog over the past few weeks, you'll know that I've jumped back into collecting LEGO minifigures, mostly thanks to discovering the Swapfig website.  Of course, it is one thing to collect all the minifigures...it is quite another to actually figure out how to store and/or display them!

Luckily, I had a plan - though the plan required quite a bit of work!

First, I had to build a workstation in my garage.  We moved into our new house about a year and a half ago, and while I love this house, I missed having a workshop in the garage like our old house had.  Therefore, when my wife decided to get some new doors in the upstairs, I knew I could take the old doors and turn them into a pretty nice work bench.

It took some doing, but here's the final result:

Not bad for a novice, right?

Literally one day after completing the work bench, I decided to put it through the paces by creating my own LEGO Minifigure display shelf.  I had a few requirements for my display shelf:
1.  I wanted each "slot" to be large enough to hold the black minifigure base that comes with every figure LEGO sells.
2.  I wanted some slots to have a double width - either to accommodate minifigures with large parts (such as Mermaid tails) or to be able to pair up two figures that "belong together."
3.  I wanted the shelf to hold a bunch of figures!
4.  I wanted to avoid using any nails or screws in the creation of the shelf.
5.  I wanted the shelf to be made of oak so that it would match most of the rest of the wooden stuff in my man cave.

After a lot of measuring (and a ton of cutting on my table saw), I was able to create a bunch of pieces that had to be put together much in the way one would assemble a puzzle.

It was definitely a moment of truth when I started the assembly, but luckily my measuring (and cutting) were true - everything fit wonderfully!

And now, I have plenty of room for many of minifigures (though not all of them - my collection is rapidly growing)!

Luckily, when we moved in our house the previous owners left a knick-knack shelf on the wall...  A shelf that I claimed right away for my LEGO figures - and as you can see, there is room on there for a few more at least...and then it'll be back to the new workshop to build yet another shelf!

If you want to see more of my "man cave" makeover, check out this entry over on my baseball-centric blog.

Comments

  1. That's a pretty nice display, and good job re-purposing those doors into a workbench. You've got a lot of minifigs!

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    1. Thanks! Yeah, I do have a lot of minifigs...and yet, I feel like I've barely made any progress in terms of collecting them all! As for the work space, I should have taken another photo after I got the pegboard all set up (and that plywood shelf removed).

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  2. Awesome. As an amateur woodworker myself this is something I really wanted to try and do, but I'll save that for the new house, whenever that happens to see if I have space. And I love the repurposing of those doors. The cool think is the door knob hole works great for running power cables through.

    I think my only suggestion would be to make each niche shorter, there seems to be a lot of wasted space and if you were to make each one about the size of the small ones on the nik-nak shelf I bet you could have gotten an whole other shelf in there, but that's the fun thing about doing stuff like this. The next one you make will get dialed in a little bit better and better until it's perfect. Still looks great though. And I really like the idea of the oversized niches too. Those would work great for those jumbo mini figures like the Hulk.

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    1. Yeah, I was happy to have the door knob holes since all my electric outlets in the garage are below the height of the table.

      As for the shelf, I think you are correct in that I could have gotten away with making the height of each row a bit shorter. I wanted to make sure to have enough clearance for all the tall accessories (fishing poles, spears, etc.) that many of the minifigures have - but I think I could have gotten away with cutting it down a bit! I'm sure I'll have to make another shelf before too long...it's a learning process for sure!

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