In addition to not buying much LEGO, I have actually been getting rid of quite a bit. I simply don’t have the room to store everything I have nor do I need a lot of the stuff I have been sitting on. So with some reservation, I have been listing sets, some new, some old, on BrickLink. Of particular interest are a 8880 Super Car and a 6399 Shuttle Launch Shuttle Launch Pad. Both of these are brand new, never been opened. I got the Super Car from LEGO Shop at Home when I got a tip that they had found some old stock but I can’t for the life of me recall where I got the Shuttle Launch Pad. I have Shuttle Launch Pad in my collection, in fact I think I have two of them and it is a great set. I can’t speak to the Super Car as I have never built one but it has always been considered one of the “must have” sets for Technic fans. So if you are looking for either of these, head over to my BrickLink store. Don’t be surprised by the prices, these aren’t cheap! 🙂
So why am I selling these sets? We moved houses about 18 months ago. In our old house I had LEGO I had picked up on clearance stashed all over the place, most of it in the garage up on some shelves. When we moved I gathered it all up on once place and was surprised how much I had. I was really, really surprised. My wife was stunned. I had Lots and lots of LEGO. Waaaay more than I would have guessed. I knew I had a bunch but until you pile it all up together, you don’t realize how much and this pile didn’t include my regular building collection!
I had purchased most of the LEGO with the intent to part out and sell on BrickLink. Several years ago I had decided that the effort to part sets out versus the return wasn’t something I enjoyed – it was a chore and I simply stopped doing it. But I didn’t stop buying sets on clearance when I found them so the number of unopened sets continued to grow. Moving forced me to do something about all these sets. I had them in storage for a while but paying to store them didn’t make much sense either and the storage unit was really for my car (a ’67 MGB) until we cleared out the garage. Once that was done, the MG could come home and the LEGO had to go somewhere so it went into my LEGO room.
Now my LEGO room isn’t very big – it is 16’x16′ with a low ceiling in our basement. It is also my home office. I have shelving around the room with all of my tubs and Plano boxes. Adding all of the unopened sets to the mix resulted in zero space to move around. It had to go. I started listing it on BrickLink but selling them one at a time would take a long time. I decided to see if I could find someone to take a bunch of it off my hands.
It turns out that Foster Thorbjornsen (THORZLEGOZ), a large BrickLink seller, lives really close to me. I had purchased from Foster several times so I contacted him and asked him if he would be interested in buying a bunch of sealed sets. It turns out he was, we worked out a deal, and my downsizing began.
I still kept a lot of unique sets, some Promos, all of the Trains, and some other hard to find things but most of it went to Foster. If you look in his inventory, many of the sets he has listed came from what I had stocked up on from 1997-2004.
Since the big purge, I have pared down a little here and there. I had a lot of Trains which I realized I would never open and since Trains take up a lot of space, I started selling them on eBay. I have since sold about 30 train sets and have a few more to go. I don’t need 4-5 copies of some of the old 9v classics (as nice as they are) so I am letting some of them go. A buyer from one of my eBay auctions has purchased most of my surplus Train stock and once he decided he doesn’t want any more, I will go back to BrickLink or eBay. I could probably get more from someone else but he buys large quantities and has been an excellent buyer so he gets first right of refusal.
Now that I have gotten rid of a lot of stuff, I am finding I enjoy what I have more. At some point chasing the “LEGO Deal” became more important that what I was building. I have plenty of bricks now – in fact, I still have more than I need but I can pretty much build what ever I want. When I find a part I need, I buy just that part via BrickLink. I don’t expect to buy many new sets any more except when I see one I like for the set (like the new Cement Mixer and Garbage Truck).
