A: Actually having space to display them! 🙂
A few months ago I wrote about having to dismantle my “toy room” because we had decided to put in new carpet, and then about getting to put together a new and improved display. This past weekend, I put the finishing touches on some upgrades.
Before we get into the upgrades, let’s take a look at where we left off the display last time.
A few people have asked me where I got the cubes. My wife and I raided the local Targets for them – while you can buy them online (ClosetMaid 9-Cube Stackable Organizer, Alder at Amazon.com) you’d save a lot getting them locally and avoiding some hefty shipping charges.
The layout of each space is a one square foot cube. Because of the one foot depth, I’ve found that some of the groupings work better with graduated heights as you get deeper in each cube. For that, I picked up some shelf organizers (Copco 2555-9624 Narrow Non-Skid 3-Tiered Shelf Organizer at Amazon.com). These particular ones are great for this setup because they’re just about a foot wide and fit perfectly, but they also have shelf organizers of greater length for more traditional shelves.
But what’s really gotten me jazzed about the display are the lights.
Even with the lights on in the toy room, the deeper portions of each cube don’t get much light, so I had been thinking about how to add lighting to each cube. There was no way I was going to wire these cubes up, so I opted for a lower-tech solution – battery-powered tap lights (New 3 LED Light Battery Powered Stick Tap Touch Light on eBay). The nicest part about these tap lights is I can choose which cubes I want lit, which can make for some nice patterns in the dark.
Aside from one more handful of tap lights to install, I think I’m done, at least with the infrastructure of the display area. Now it’s dealing with the ever-growing collection and shuffling displays around. At least that’s the fun part!
VERY impressive! I’ve just spent the last 5 minutes looking at the display and am in awe of how cool it looks. I’ve got to get some of those touch lights for my own display 🙂
Marc
Wow… I’m jealous.
WOW! Awesome display man. Did you build them or buy them? I’ve been thinking of doing the same thing but seeing what you did really helps cement what I want to do!
Wow I am jealous of all the space you have Ron! Also the displays look great with the lights and all! What about dust? Do you have to dust off every now and then? I’m leaning towards getting those Ikea Detolf shelves with glass, ‘cos I hate dusting! Your set up makes me rethink that though!
You are my new hero. I am in the midst of changing an old structure in my back yard from a falling down building with holes in the walls to a hobby room. One thing I had to make sure of is having room for displays. This looks like a great solution. I am definitely going to have to look into these.
The display looks great! I was wondering where you got those tiered risers from.
Very cool display! I’ll be moving in the near future and so now is the perfect time to ponder what to do with my collection/display.
@ sandman – Detolfs work pretty well, but they still get dusty too. As with everything from Ikea, the pieces don’t always fit together perfectly flush. 🙁
Sweet! We just finished moving into a bigger place and I think I may have room for something like this (not quite as wide) in our bedroom. Nice job!
That’s friggin kewl!
The comment about getting Detolf’s in place of brick cubes to store figures in an attempt to avoid dust made me chuckle. Sorry, unfortunately other than a climate controlled clean room, I don’t know of a place that will avoid dust. In fact, I think my Detolf accumulates more dust than my book shelf!
I do like the cube idea with puck lights though, so that may be something I upgrade to in the near future. Just hate investing in the infrastructure when I’m not sure how it will work in actual use. Guess there’s no harm in buying a set of cubes and trying this out. Thanks for the idea!
Cubes what a great idea! I thought I was being smart using a bakers’ rack but I’ll make the switch to cubes.