Sorting and cleaning my LEGO collection
Note: I am 100% burying the lede in this post; if you want, you can skip to it.
Some time ago, I gathered all of the Star Wars LEGO from my parents' house. This was LEGO I bought for myself (or received as gifts in some instances) and was "definitively" mine. The collection has sat in our basement inside a non-descript IKEA bin, opened only to use the tray insert when building new sets and depositing the leftover pieces (in a small container—the spare pieces are TINY).
Recently I did the same with the remaining sets at my parents' house. There's a mix of Pirate sets, castle sets (including a Forestmen set), and one or two individual Space or Space-adjacent sets. We used to have a lot of Space sets, but my brother grabbed those and many City pieces for his daughter—that was at least 15 years ago.
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I started cataloguing the LEGO sets on Rebrickable, primarily because I discovered alternate builds ("MOC" in Rebrickable parlance) and it helped a great deal to list the sets that you own; when you find a set, you can either find MOCs that use that set's pieces entirely, or you can click on an original MOC and find out if you have enough pieces to build it based on your collection.
By consequence I found last week that Rebrickable also tells you the value of your collection. I was surprised to find that my collection is valued at over $11k—probably more, as I haven't entered all of the sets. That's an astounding number, but I know that it's also not accurate.
Comparing to another collectibles category, in searching for other items at my parents' house, I found a starter deck for Magic: The Gathering. The deck is probably from 1995, at least that's the copyright date I see on most cards. I never played, finding the instructions confusing. All I remember is that I thought the artwork was cool (it still is). As I have no use for these cards, I want to get rid of them. Searching around, I found an app that allows you to scan your cards to determine the value—I'd like some compensation for going to the trouble of listing them and finding a buyer and meeting them.
The app told me after scanning all of the cards that my collection was worth around $160 CAD. I asked some friends online if this was accurate, and they told me "probably not". There were some mis-scans based on similar cards, and the card versions automatically selected were likely wrong. I made the necessary corrections and the value dropped down to about $30 (I also changed the card condition from "near mint" to "good" or "played" or something like that). This is more in line with my original plan: list on Facebook Marketplace for $25 and hope to find a buyer.
I likely will not get $25, but I'll take what I can.
I bring this up as a comparison because this is most likely what would happen to my LEGO collection if I ever tried to sell it. In some cases, maybe not all the pieces are present, and while I have instruction booklets, they're not all in great condition and I don't have the boxes for most.
Just a reminder that what a website or app tells you about the "value" of a collection is just the highest price people have bought them for, not a magical stock you can bank on for retirement.
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But I'm not selling it, for reasons which will become obvious in short order.
I took these remaining LEGO sets for two reasons:
As mentioned, my oldest brother took the bulk of the Space and City sets for himself and his daughters (a good decision, as the youngest of the two nieces is still interested in LEGO!);
My parents are already giving old Hot Wheels and Transformers to my youngest niece1 and nephew, and they love those cars.
From what I've seen, neither kid is interested in building with LEGO. My 8-year-old niece much prefers to draw and dip into her artistic side (much like her Dad, who is a musician) while the younger nephew seems to like cars and is super active and jumping around everywhere.
Kids are well-known to speed-run through toys—in the moment, a toy is the best thing in the world when they receive it. But maybe a week or two later, they move on to something else. We much prefer to give them gifts that allow them to be more creative, and that tends to be Play-Doh or colouring books or markers. Those are the things that seem to last with both of them.
Additionally, my wife and I are expecting a baby in January 2027. I really want to share my love of LEGO with my child (or possibly—children? We're going to worry about just one for now). Right now I'm sorting the LEGO into bins separated by themes, but I fully expect the pieces to get mixed around while they dig for just the right piece to finish their masterpiece.
Growing up, our LEGO bins were almost always mixed together. Some of it was separated but most of the time we were mixing and matching as needed.
I'm really looking forward to this new adventure, and while there are many, many more important things to take care of before we need to worry about graduating from the Duplo system to more advanced LEGO, this is something that is important to me and will (hopefully) lead to some parent-child bonding moments to get them started on their own LEGO adventures.
They just can't touch the "display" LEGO until they're old enough not to lose pieces.
If you came down here to read the big news, you click here to go back and read the whole thing.
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My oldest nephew decided to identify as a girl recently, and I am trying to remember this. It's hard to go from saying "nephews" to "niece and nephew" when referring to them. It'll get easier.↩