While combing the Internet for information about BrickHeadz, I came across lots of methods and ideas on how best to store and display the figures from this series. Basically, there are as many ideas as there are people, just as many as there are ways of storing anything that is roughly the size of a BrickHeadz. Just type BrickHeadz shelves into Google to see for yourself.
I have no ambition to list and review the most popular methods here, because there are simply too many of them. Let’s add that everyone has different conditions at home and everyone has to find a solution that happens to work for them. And really I should have started by saying that not everyone collects the figures, because there is quite a sizeable group of enthusiasts who collect MISBs (mint in sealed box), meaning unopened sets in their original, untouched boxes.
Getting back to the topic of this article, as my collection grew I started having trouble finding space for new figures. I won’t describe the whole story now because it doesn’t matter; in the end I decided to use the Mellösa shelves from IKEA and now I’ll show you what their advantages are and how it looks. Especially since I haven’t come across this particular way of using them anywhere else on the Internet, it’s my own original idea! 🙂
Let’s start with the fact that these are just shelves, the bricks aren’t protected from dust in any way. That’s a big drawback, but many of us live with it and are doing just fine. Personally, I wanted something small, hung on the wall and ideally not too eye-catching, so that the figures themselves would be in the foreground. It also had to be easy to get hold of and use, ideally I’d go to the shop, buy it and be done.
I tried to make the solution versatile. If I ever change my approach, I want to be able to take it down easily or use it for something else, for example to stand photo frames on. Because the IKEA shelves I chose are transparent, they don’t catch the eye at all. Of course I’d be exaggerating if I wrote that they are practically invisible, but the visual difference between them and wooden shelves is huge, not to mention all kinds of bookcases.
My secret is that I lay a second shelf on top of the first one in the right way. They are deep enough for it to fit, the figures on top and at the bottom have enough space, and on top of that there’s no need to drill any more holes. I won’t write a complicated description of how it works, the photos speak for themselves. Simply put, one shelf hangs on the wall and a second, identical one stands on it. It’s stable, there’s no chance of anything falling off unless you get hit by earthquakes. Up close, the look of this solution might bother some people, but in real life it doesn’t catch the eye at all. For me it’s all pluses, judge for yourselves.
And everything would be great if it weren’t for the fact that to fit my whole collection this way I’d need twice as many of these shelves, and I have nowhere to hang them 🙂
Update 2023-01-17
At the beginning of this text I wrote that I didn’t want to review other methods of storing and displaying BrickHeadz figures. That has changed, though, and I decided that one of the offers available on the Internet deserves a separate write-up. I encourage you to read it here.