Around June 2020, with lockdown getting the better of us, me and my wife popped into Smyths Toy Store as we just found out we were expecting!
We were drawn to the Lego Friends Central Perk set and decided to justify the purchase as a coffee table centre-piece.
We built it as soon as we got home, and it brought back so many childhood memories that I couldn’t resist browsing on eBay and the LEGO store!
A week later I had spend quite a bit of money and knew I wanted to set up a city in my bare attic. After building a few sets I really wanted to do a MOC (My Own Creation) – so I decided to build our own home. This was my first experience of Bricklink and free building.
Our house
My first MOC
It turned out pretty good I think….to finish it off I noticed that the mini figures in the airport set fitted with our family so I used those. 2 weeks ago we gave birth to our beautiful daughter and I really wanted to do a comparison photo outside our real house.
Our Lego house now sits proudly in our city in the residential area at the end of the street as a focal point!
My name is Benjamin Rummens and this is my LEGO® story.
As a child, I played hours and hours with the lovely bricks alongside my brothers. I stopped playing as an adult , but when I bought the Queen Ann’s Revenge LEGO® set for the 5th birthday of my son Noah… it all came back.
I have always been busy artistically – as an artist first (I studied plastic Arts) and most recently as a street and circus performer. Two years ago I got the idea to make my vacation pictures a bit more creative – and in every picture you could see a dad with his two sons.
During the last few months, due to COVID, all my shows have been cancelled – so we got back to the idea. What about taking creative pictures of LEGO® minifigures in real-world situations.
So my youngest son Janosh and I started the project again, just with much more details and with many more minifigures than before. Because we have a big collection of them the possibilities are endless!
Sometimes people on the street find me and my son quite strange, when they see us laying there belly flat on the ground with a minifigure. But we don’t really care, it is our moment – and we are making other people laugh.
So everyday we try to take a new picture, and it is very interesting because we really start to look differently to our environment and notice. It is like a never ending quest, and we didn’t even start to use the figures of Lord of the Rings.
We will keep adding more and more minifigure adventures in our page and I hope they inspire people to be creative. Even with the constraints of a pandemic, creativity will always win!
I have been passionate about LEGO® since the first set I received as a child about 40 years ago. My childhood was dominated by the building toy, it’s all I wanted for Christmas and birthdays.
My passion for building with LEGO® continued on as a young adult. I had my first child at 21, and I used this as an excuse to buy more LEGO® for my daughter to play with. Back then it just wasn’t as socially acceptable for adults to play with the building bricks, so this worked well for me! In 2009 I started to get more serious about the hobby when my second child was on the way. This was also around the time when LEGO® started releasing more complex and adult oriented sets with the Creator expert line, and the first Winter Village set, the Toy Shop.
I was very excited that LEGO® decided to start this theme. As a child I always marveled at my grandmother’s ceramic winter village display she would put out each year on their fireplace mantel. The thought of recreating this in LEGO® was quite exciting and a tradition I wanted to carry on in the family in a new form.
The first rendition of my Winter Village was displayed in 2010 once the second set was released from LEGO®, and I had a modest setup with some customizations. This of course continued to grow each year as new sets were released and I acquired more pieces via buying on BrickLink and harvesting extra inventory from my own BrickLink store.
Photo by author
Around Christmas 2019 I realized I had to rethink my display with the limited space I had and the ever increasing number of sets and parts I had at my disposal. I knew I had to build up. The living room credenza was the only space I had and it measures 63″ x 16″ deep. Work began on planning the structure and ordering parts.
Due to COVID, I had more time and budget on my hand as we were at home a lot and were not traveling much. So In the summer of 2020 I finalized my design on paper and ordered the final parts I would need to build my vision. I sorted and organized everything and started the build, from scratch, in October. I spent about a month getting everything just right and to the point you see it here in my video.
My future plans include lighting and to add some movement with power functions, as there is lot’s of space under the elevated section in the back.
I have received so much positive feedback for my creation, and hopefully this inspires others to keep building!
One of my friends I’ve known for 6 years, Ted Wahler Jr, checked in on me yesterday to make sure I wasn’t too stressed at work. I mentioned how I’ve been building LEGO® here to help reduce stress. I’ve been collecting and building LEGO® for just over a year, and I haven’t really spoken about it to other people until recently when I really started getting into the groups, forums, and conventions to meet other LEGO® enthusiasts.
Ted had no idea that I was into LEGO® and he asked me if I knew his connection to LEGO®, which I didn’t, so I asked him about it. It turns out, his dad ran the Samsonite Toy division in the 1960s when LEGO® came to America. Wait, what?!
This is what Ted shared with me:
“As you know, LEGO® originated in Denmark, a gentleman named Christiansen licensed the rights to Samsonite for manufacture and sales in the US. Samsonite hired my Father, also named Ted Wahler, to run that division. He ran the LEGO® division until Samsonite gave it up in the early seventies. I was the first model in the first set brochure, I think in 1963. My brother, Eric Wahler, was the second. My father took it from the 2 brick, 4, 6, and 8 block. He invented baseplates, longer blocks, the motor and gears, the roof blocks, windows, and some that I am not thinking about right now. We were the guinea pigs. We always had prototype toys costing thousands of dollars each but never the regular toys the other kids had. I built a model Monticello for a school project once from hand made pieces that were being invented as I built. They were then approved and went into production.”
I looked up some of the 1960s brochures and we found the ones with him and his brother. This is my friend Ted in the picture:
Source: Brickfetish.com
Ted also told me that he felt that his father never seemed to have received the accolades he deserved for all of the innovations he brought to LEGO®. It was easy for him to see his dad’s contributions because he “sat at the kitchen table with him as my dad welded with acetone, glued with epoxy, and cut and pasted bits and pieces together. Then he tested it on us – his kids. Some of those eventually made it to production.” His dad was “dedicated to learning pathways, personal creativity, and using play to build critical thinking skills”.
“Frankly, my poor Father would hate all of the single purpose kits that seem to be the core of the product line now. We had a one foot by six foot box of “floor sweepings”, which were the blocks that fell on the factory floor, that us brothers would sit around and build stuff from. That was his vision. Not a lot of kids had a Dad with a clipboard watching them play I’m guessing.”
I explained to Ted how kids these days usually take the sets apart after they build them to build their own creations, so that’s something that Ted’s dad would have been happy about. I shared with him how the world of MOC’s (my own creations/custom builds) is huge, and shared some MOC LEGO® groups with him.
About my story with LEGO®: I met Ted at a Float Conference 6 years ago. We both run massage therapy/float therapy centers, which are great for helping people reduce stress, among other great benefits such as helping with anxiety, pain, and other mental health disorders. But running a float center can be very stressful.
I bought a few of the UCS Star Wars LEGO® sets during a trip to the Mall of America about 6 years ago. I had no intention of buying LEGO® during that trip to Minneapolis, but I stopped by the Mall of America because I wanted to see the large sculptures that I had seen in pictures. I’ve always been a huge Star Wars fan and after seeing some of the UCS sets they had at the store I thought to myself, “wow, LEGO® has come a long way since I was a kid. These would look amazing on display at home”.
Photo by author
So I bought 6 sets that day, had fun building them, and had them on display for years. When LEGO® released the newer UCS Millennium I bought it, and shortly after that I REALLY got back into LEGO® building and collecting.
And I am probably never going to stop. And although my friend’s dad, Ted Wahler Sr., might have not received the accolades he deserved when he was alive, it seems that he played a major role in bringing Old Kirk Christensen’s vision to America to help shape how we all know and play with LEGO® today, and I’ll never forget that. And I am probably never going to stop. And although my friend’s dad, Ted Wahler Sr. might have not received the accolades he deserved when he was alive, it seems that he played a major role in bringing Old Kirk Christensen’s vision to America to help shape how we all know and play with LEGO® today, and I’ll never forget that.
LEGO® has always been a part of my life. As young as 3 years old I was playing with it. My father traveled a lot when I was young and, back in those days, the only toy available at airports was LEGO®. I used to wait for him to come home, not just to see him, but to see what LEGO® he had found.
As I grew older, I moved through the various genres of the brick, from town and space through the electronic train and into Technic. I have always been an early riser and my mother said she always knew when I was awake because she could hear the LEGO® being rummaged through.
I was never someone that played with LEGO®, I was always purely a builder. Nothing was ever finished so there was no time to swoop the spaceship through the air, I could always see how it could be improved or that it needed a landing pad or support truck.
Laurence Woolford
By the time I was 13 and moving into being a teenager I had amassed quite a collection and had a permanent LEGO® layout in my room. My move to boarding school started my path into adulthood and I put my LEGO® into several large storage boxes and hid them in my parents’ loft. It was not until years later with the birth of my 3 children that my LEGO® was recovered, and I started an entirely new relationship with my lost youth.
Laurence Woolford
I delighted in teaching them how to build but would find myself staying up late into the night building. Buying LEGO® for them and spending time building reconnected me with lots of happy memories and feelings from my youth which helped me through 2 nasty divorces. I can remember at the end of my first marriage building a huge Eagle Transporter from Space 1999 that was minifigure scale and over a meter long.
As my children grew away from LEGO®, LEGO® became more and more a part of my life. I used building as time to think and reflect. I was never happier than building, listening to an audio book and letting my mind wonder over all the problems of my life. My LEGO® was listed in my second divorce and I nearly lost my 1st Edition Millennium Falcon! Fortunately, I have managed to hold onto it although it was destroyed and had to be rebuilt from scratch!
Now a bachelor, and still a big kid, I have embraced my LEGO® heritage. It is a huge part of my life. I have a “mini figure me” the travels all over the world with me and has been to some amazing places from Maputo to Burma. It always gets a huge smile when I set him up to take a picture.
Laurence Woolford
During the recent renovation of my home I was determined to make LEGO® a permanent part of the building, making a corner of a garden wall a feature to look like the entire wall was LEGO®. It is this that has inspired me to build a LEGO® house into the corner wall of the kitchen. The house is about to have all the windows changed so my LEGO® room is packed up but I do have some of my favourite pieces on display in the downstairs toilet!
I don’t remember building LEGO® while growing up. Never felt particularly drawn to it but – like with Scouting – I always thought I’d love for my kids to try. You always want them to be the best version of themselves that they want, right?
When we went to other kids’ places, not much interest in LEGO®, at all.
But at home, she received her first LEGO® at 4 – a kit with guided mini-builds. A fun own-time with mommy, the final result displayed in her bookshelf, but not coming across as a big passion.
Illustrating her emotions around the virus through LEGO®, but mostly competing with fellow co-workers’ kids for the tallest LEGO® tower, brought both excitement and tears. It was her competitiveness that was her catapult to LEGO® – go figure!! Your kids are their own person, and that’s so good!
Photo credit: Raquel Lemos
So now we’re growing into LEGO® (and DUPLO®), all girls in the family, with story-telling and creative stops in the builds as their rightful demands.
They’re on the lead, I enable. 🙂 It turns out it’s fun and kind and sharing and opening windows. It can be a lot.
Looking forward to the next episodes with my girls.
When I was 10, my dad went on a business trip to Las Vegas.
Before he left his hotel for his return flight, he decided to play blackjack with $50 and got very lucky. When he returned home, he brought us to Walmart and told us we could pick out whatever we wanted!
I went to the LEGO® aisle and got the #6520 – Mobile Outpost and #6579 – Ice Surfer. THE ICE SURFER – the coolest set!
As a 10 year old, it was the greatest night of my life. My family was very frugal, and they never spoiled us kids, so it’s the only time something like that ever happened. Receiving a LEGO® set outside of a birthday or Christmas was unheard of. Which made that night all the more special.
It is by far my fondest memory. I still have those two sets in pieces and I am now trying to put them back together.
