Transitioning: Five Years After the Color Change

[Chuck06]

Hi All,

With bley/red brown pieces now having solidly stocked sets and PAB bins (though one can still find the odd part in old grey/brown there) for a number of years, I was wondering how AFOL's have adjusted their collections, and building and buying habits to the change.

Personally, I have developed a number of habits:
1. Initially,I stockpiled old colored bricks until I built up a number I would be largely satisfied with in case I could never buy more.
2. I sort and store old and new colors of basic bricks separately, but do no separate old and new colors of more specialized pieces for storage.
3. When building, I tend to color separate basic bricks (especially 2x4's and larger) and castle architecture pieces (arches, slopes, etc.) or strategically intermix them (for example: light grey as main castle color with dark bley for accent). I am less discriminartory for smaller and more specialized pieces.
4. When buying in bulk (much rarer now than 3 years ago), I get old greys and browns on bricklink and am usually willing to pay the extra pennies per piece.
5. I have slowed my rate of buying new sets to those which I find exceptional (MMV, KCS, etc.)
6. I maintain my stockpile of bleys to use mostly as reserve pieces for MOCs that stretch the limits of my collection or as accent colors.
7. I use red/brown considerably more often than the bleys.

So there you have it: my idiosyncratic ways of incorporating the color change. How has everyone else made the switch?

-chuck

[Yegos]

I don't make a distinction between the colors anymore. I have a fair amount of the old grays and initially did make the separation you make now but I found in the long run, it didn't do me any good. Building with the older colors is becoming a little too expensive on any scale as getting replacement bricks is only going to get more expensive. I decided to move them out of my "build" bins in favor of the new grays, browns, and reds.

I now use my old colors as specialty pieces to accent the new bleys or to build smaller "aged" structures.

[Gumby]

I'm pretty much like you, chuck. I stockpiled the old colors, don't buy in bulk any longer, keep the new colours separate, and only buy new sets that are exceptional (i.e. MMV, Green Grocer, etc).

However I haven't opened/built any of my new sets due to time constraints...

[plums_deify]

I have so little of the older colors--I came out of my dark age right at the color change itself. I rarely ever build with the affect colors, too, so I never felt the impact.

So to answer your question, I've made no adjusments.

[RichardAM]

I'll be honest, i'm a fiend for classic old grey. That said however, when i'm building walls i'll still put in 1x2 bley bricks, simply for variation. When it comes to brown and red brown, invariably used for wood, i'm not as picky.

Eitherway, i'm always on the lookout to buy the older colours if I can. I'm nostalgic/fussy/awkward like that.

[nanuck95]

I didn't start collecting again until well after the color change, but I have acquired a number of vintage sets since then via ebay/bricklink. I more or less keep them separate, since for whatever reason my eyes have difficulty telling the difference between the old and new gray unless I have really good lighting.

I still occasionally collect vintage sets, and I have enough bricks to build smaller moc's. For the most part, I build everything out of the newer colors since that's what I have the most of, that's what's most readily available, and in large quantities it's what's most affordable.

[wobnam]

I didn't have a lot of old greys, but what I did have I just burned.

[davee123]

The color change hit me pretty hard. I had about 300,000 bricks at the time, and was pretty much at the peak of my buying. Up until that point, I had been buying a LOT, and I was focusing on gray, dark gray, brown, and tan. If a set had a decent chunk of those colors, I'd buy it up in quantity. That's how I wound up with 7 copies of 5988 Pharoah's Forbidden Ruins, or 20 copies of the 7110 Landspeeder, or 10 copies of the 7140 X-wing. Mostly at full retail price! I bought anything that had those nice earth-tone colors, and used it as an excuse for buying an otherwise lackluster set.

When the color change hit, I initially thought I'd stockpile up all the new colors until the day that my new colors equaled my old colors, at which point I'd make the switch. That day has not yet dawned.

Unfortunately, I found that buying sets didn't have the same appeal anymore. For starters, it was (and still is) an inordinately arduous task to verify the color of each and every piece when sorting. But additionally, I was effectively tossing aside 50% of the pieces I was buying. New gray slopes? Toss 'em in the new gray bin, waiting for that day when I'll have enough! Brown bricks? Toss 'em in that pile I won't use for a few years! What I was left adding to my "usable" collection was substantially minimal.

The result is that buying sets became less interesting to me, so my purchasing went WAY down. Also, it became so painful to sort (due to the color change and also to my collection size), that my collection went largely unsorted, and it became very difficult to build. So now I build very infrequently. And when I do, I try to make sure to use only old colors or only old colors in any given model.

As for storage, as I said, I started amassing a wealth of "new color" parts. New gray, new dark gray, and new brown have been getting thrown into a few 15 gallon tubs, which are now getting pretty full. The exceptions have been technic elements and "minifig stuff". New colors in those have gotten added to the normal sorting technique, because generally they don't tend to have such a mottling effect on finished models, since they're typically distinct parts (in the case of minifig stuff) or are hidden functional elements (in the case of technic).

So now, the time is coming at last to actually sort those bins. I've got about 600,000 elements of my own collection, and I've recently married another LEGO fan (and gotten some large acquisitions) that bring us to the million piece ballpark. I'm guessing that in the next few months, the new colors will finally, at long last, be sorted into the rest of my collection (separately from the old colors, of course!)

DaveE

[Albatross_Viking]

I just use new and old bricks in a mixture to add some variation, and because i dont really have enough bricks to build anything at least mid-sized with only one of the grays...

A_V

[Count Blacktron]

Separate, but equally used by me. I built up a lot of classics, but it's nowhere near "enough" for all my needs. I have no trouble embracing the newer colors as long as there is good quality in them. Personally I prefer the older colors for antique or an aged look to my creations; the newer colors seem more like "green" wood and fresh granite.

[BreadMan]

My habits follow yours almost to the letter, Chuck, except that I have stopped buying old brown completely. So many more elements are available in new brown then were ever in old brown and I think my new brown collection is now about double what my old brown collection came to, I've converted almost completely. I've definitely been finding use for dark bley, mainly for accents as you said, and I don't mind light bley so much, but I still buy up old dark grey for landscaping whenever I can.

[DNL]

When i discovered the online AFOL community and started to buy more LEGO the colors had fortunately already changed. I already had quite some old gray pieces, but when the 2007 castle sets came out i decided to just buy the new colors. At first i used both colors in the same building, but that didn't really look nice, so I started to use mostly new gray and some old grey pieces that i didn't have in new gray (i didn't have any bley plates...).

When my collection of new colors had grown i completely stopped using the old grays, although i still use both browns at the same time to have some variation. Right now my old gray bricks are stored separated from my new gray bricks, and i usually only use the old grays to underneath my landscapes on the sides to fill in the empty space under hills.

[Foamrider]

Like some others, I didn't have a ton of old grey when the switch happened. But I'm quite all right with that, as bley is much better suited to the style I build in.

[stuifzand]

My story is similar to the story of DaveE. I was at my peek of buying grey parts when the colourchange hit.
I have been mad for about 3 years.
I wanted to buy new sets, because I'm really into the new fantasy figs, but I didn't know what to do with the bley parts.
So, I tossed them all in a bin, waiting for.. well waiting for what?

Then, I tried to mix them. Some people can do that while building, and when I was looking at the results it looked quite nice.
I was talking to Aliencat about this when we were at an event and he told me he just puts the bricks all together in a bin and takes them out random.
I tried, really, I tried...

I just can't do it.

I have decided (recently) to put aside my old greys. I have about 1500 2x2 and 1000 1x2 and some more small old grey bricks that I use to build my mocs. I have calculated that if I invest a few hundred euros in bley my collection equals what I have now in old grey. It's no problem for me, as I buy sets all the time, but it's more the idea of "giving up"
What counts is that I actually like bley.
Living near Legoland (well, 600km away) gave me opportunities to buy loads of bley tiles (and I took it).
My pile of bley bricks grows every month and it's about right now to start using them.
For me, the problem with bley is over now. I have been sad about this for 5 years.
A few weeks ago my girlfriend said "why don't you just put the old aside and buy some new if it hurts you so much".
That's the message I needed I think, if feels a bit like betrayal to store the old collection and buy a new one.

Weird : I opened a topic about the exact same thing about 2 weeks ago at my forums.

[ben_toy_tech]

As a perfectionist, it annoys me to have to keep such similar colors separate from one another as I must compare every piece to a known bley object. It is very time consuming..... I still prefer old light gray. Of course, most of the sets I own are from the vintage era, so that helps. I often wonder what possessed LEGO to alter the color, I'm sure they had their reasons, but it could not have been *that* good a reason!