Featured image: Newspaper headline from 1996.

Once Upon a Brick · Chapter 6

The story of how Infinite Brick came to be: the people, ideas, and moments that shaped it. Each chapter reveals another piece of the journey connecting LEGO creativity with the community around it.

Welcome! If you're new to the series, start with Chapter 1: Before the Beginning

I still have the newspaper clipping:

My bedroom, laden with LEGO, staged for the article. Space factions prominently displayed up front, Technic Super Car in hand. City sets strewn in the background.

I was 11. Grade 6. A small-town kid in the local paper, standing beside my bed surrounded by a good chunk of my collection. Some of my most prized themes and sets were represented.

There's a line in the article I keep coming back to:

The then-flagship Technic set: 8880 Super Car, the 1343 piece engineering marvel of the 1990s that was the first Technic set to feature an 8 cylinder motor. It also boasted 4 wheel drive, 4 wheel steering, independent suspension and shifting gearbox!

I was eleven when I said that.

I'm not 53 yet. But I'm closer to that age than I am to the one I was when I made the prediction.

A few paragraphs down:

If you've been reading along, you already know how that part of the story turned out.

The article ended with a prediction in the third person — that I would “continue the love affair through his adult years.”

For a while, that looked optimistic.

By the time I was old enough to want a part-time job, LEGO had already started taking a back seat. I covered the drift last chapter. What I didn't cover was where the time and money went instead.

I sold things.

A lot of things.

I sort of got addicted to having yard sales at my grandma's. I'd pillage my own belongings looking for anything someone might part with a few dollars for. Old toys, things I'd outgrown. The kind of stuff that probably should have gone to a donation bin, but I'd talked myself into believing held cash value, and someone had to find out.

Some of it actually sold. Some didn't. Either way, I'd be back the next weekend with more.

But the LEGO was never on the table.

Not a single set.

I didn't make a rule about it. I didn't think it through. I just knew, in whatever way a teenager knows things, that those bricks weren't for sale. Not the Ice Planet collection. Not the Blacktron ships. Not the Technic invention with the dual 9v motors that never quite made it through the snow.

Everything else, sure.

But not a single LEGO brick.

University arrived, and turns out dorm rooms aren't built for sprawling LEGO collections. So the LEGO — along with the rest of my childhood — stayed back home, on display for no one.

A few years after that, my dad sold the childhood home.

That meant everything came out at once. Every bin. Every box. Every half-disassembled MOC I'd told myself I was going to finish. All of it had to go somewhere.

My partner and I had just bought our first house. It wasn't big. There was no room I could reasonably call a LEGO room — and I wasn't sure I wanted one anyway. I was working. We had a mortgage. The hobby felt a bit like it belonged to someone I used to be.

So the LEGO stayed in storage.

Not sold. Not given away. Not even unpacked.

Just… waiting.

Months would go by. A year. Then more.

The article said I'd continue the love affair through my adult years.

For a stretch in there, it looked like I'd quietly stopped showing up.

I don't remember exactly what I was doing the day I opened the bin.

Looking for something else, probably. Whatever it was, I moved a bin out of the way, and then — for no particular reason — I lifted the lid.

Old space sets. Something clicked.

Some still assembled. Most in pieces. Familiar colours caught my eye: the trans-neon green from Blacktron II and M:Tron. The trans-neon-orange of my beloved Ice Planet sets. The vibrant palette of city sets, exactly the way I'd left them.

I stood there for longer than I'd like to admit.

It wasn't a comeback. Not yet. I didn't dig out instructions or post a triumphant photo online. I didn't go buy anything.

I just looked.

And realized something I hadn't quite let myself realize before.

The article wasn't wrong.

Packed away is not the same thing as gone.

Share Your Story

Maybe your version of this looks different than mine. Maybe LEGO never quite went into storage for you. Or maybe it did, and you're still in some form of dark ages. Or maybe a bin showed up at the wrong — or right — moment, and something in you woke back up.

↓ Tell Your Story ↓

I'd love to hear it.

Until the Next Chapter…

The bin wasn't the return.

But it was the moment the door cracked open.

What happened next would take a few more years, a different house, a different town — and one specific room I'd been quietly hoping for.

Chapter Seven is in the works.

— Tyler | Infinite Brick