Our Lego Museum Introduction
- sarahwilk24
- Aug 30
- 10 min read
Updated: Sep 9
How it All Started...
939 pieces | LEGO: 10313
Assembled by Sarah Wilkinson, March 2023
Interaction Rating: 3 / 5 (interaction with the set is okay, but only if an adult is helping)
For Christmas 2023, Sarah’s dear friend Nena gave her what at the time seemed like a very innocent gift: the LEGO Wildflower Bouquet. Sarah had never done a LEGO set in her life, but Nena thought she might like it. Oh, Nena, how right you were. Sarah enjoyed it so much that Hunter gifted her the LEGO Flower Bouquet (10280) for their anniversary in February 2024. Hunter grew up building with LEGO (for evidence, see the LEGO cake his sister baked for his sixteenth birthday, pictured below) and never outgrew the hobby as an adult. While planning the wedding in July 2024, Hunter innocently suggested using LEGO flowers for decor instead of live ones. It would probably cost about the same, but LEGO flowers last forever. Sarah liked this idea and began looking online at the various brick flowers available (there were so many options!).
...And How We Ended Up with Over 500,000 Bricks
781 pieces | Loz: 1228
Assembled by Vanessa Reyes, February 2025
Interaction Rating: 3 / 5 (interaction with the set is okay, but only if an adult is helping)
As Sarah explored all the brick flower options both in LEGO brand and alternative brands, she also began to encounter all the other types of sets that were available and realized how freakin’ cool many of them were. The wheels in her brain started turning, and in September 2024, Sarah proposed the idea to Hunter that they utilize some of the non-flower sets to tell stories of their dates, engagement, and other important milestones in their love story. Hunter innocently agreed to the concept, and Sarah began searching for sets to help tell their story. As their vision evolved, all the decor for the wedding, from the cake to the arch decorations, right down to the ring boxes, centered around a brick theme.
LEGO is Expensive, Y'all
541 pieces | LEGO: 40574 (retired)
Assembled by Andrew Deese, April 2025
Interaction Rating: 5 / 5 (interaction with the set is encouraged)
If you’ve ever purchased LEGOs for yourself or someone in your family, you know that LEGOs are EXPENSIVE. As Sarah began adding more and more brick sets to their wish list, the couple soon realized they had a budget problem. They had already decided that they wouldn’t be LEGO-brand “purists” and would be open to having alternative brands at the wedding. But that alone wasn’t going to be enough to keep costs down for Sarah’s increasingly ambitious vision for a full-scale museum exhibit featuring brick sets to tell stories of all their adventures (and we do mean ALL).
A LEGO-Sized Mailbox
526 pieces | Xbvert: 66022
Assembled by Vanessa Reyes, December 2024
Interaction Rating: 4 / 5 (interaction with the set is encouraged, but use extra care)
Over the next few months, Sarah learned how to track down the best prices for the sets on their wish list. Hunter received A LOT of brick sets for Christmas gifts. By the end of the year, the couple had acquired over 100 flower brick sets and another 280 other types of sets to feature in their museum. They'd also gotten quite friendly with all the delivery drivers whose route included the couple's home, since they were making near-daily deliveries at this time. Through this process, they also learned that they have a "clown-car" style mailbox that can fit a truly shocking amount of brick sets all at once.
Smells Like It's Time for a Spreadsheet
76 pieces | Custom
Designed and assembled by Hunter Williams, Sarah Wilkinson; July 2025
Interaction Rating: 3 / 5 (interaction with the set is okay, but only if an adult is helping)
Pretty soon, it became apparent to Sarah that she'd need a spreadsheet to help keep track of all the brick sets they were acquiring. The basic spreadsheet she created evolved several times throughout the planning process, getting more detailed as the plan for the exhibits grew more complex. Several spreadsheets were required to pull the exhibit off and successfully build the accompanying website. Point to a set on any shelf, and Sarah can tell you the date it was purchased, its origin, the number of pieces it contains, the item number, who assembled it, when it was assembled, its value, and the actual amount paid for it. To see some of the mind-boggling stats about the exhibit, made possible by the spreadsheets Sarah meticulously kept, check out the Master Builders page. The "Smells like it's time for a spreadsheet" candle was too funny to pass up, and Hunter made the cute little brick holder for it from the bulk bin at their local Bricks & Minifigs store. Hunter got to know their staff quite well during his monthly trips to the store for a free bag of bulk LEGO (a perk they won at the store's anniversary party when they spent over $200 in one go).
We Get By with a Little Help From Our Friends
1,070 pieces each | LEGO 21319 (retired)
Assembled by Mike Alfare, July 2025
Interaction Rating: 4 / 5 (interaction with the set is encouraged, but use extra care)
Sarah and Hunter soon realized they needed help assembling all the brick sets they’d acquired. So they hatched a plan. Under the guise of Hunter’s 30th birthday in December 2024, they hosted a party at their house. At the end of the night, Sarah and Hunter held their friends hostage until they agreed to take some brick sets home to assemble on the couple’s behalf. Everyone was excited to help, and they collectively took home over 20 sets that night. Two friends, Vanessa and Mike, quickly finished the sets they took home and requested more. Sarah and Hunter couldn’t believe their luck and gladly sent more brick sets to their house (and then more, and then more). They are the undisputed champions of Lego Assembly Helpers at the wedding. The couple’s nephew, Andrew (age 6), also received regular shipments of age-appropriate brick sets, worked diligently to complete them, and was very understanding of the fact that he couldn't keep any of them. Many others also helped along the way. Sarah and Hunter couldn’t have pulled off their Lego Museum dream without help from their loved ones.
Robbing LEGO Trucks
278 pieces | Unbranded: 20256
Assembled by Sarah Wilkinson, May 2025
Interaction Rating: 4 / 5 (interaction with the set is encouraged, but use extra care)
By the end of 2024, the couple had already invested a substantial portion of their wedding budget in acquiring brick sets for the museum exhibit and other decorative items. Sarah devised a plan to utilize the hyper-specific and otherwise useless knowledge she’d gained about the "brick economy" to enter the resale market and help recoup some of their costs. She quickly succeeded on eBay and Facebook Marketplace, earning over $4,500 in profit from sales between December 2024 and September 2025. Among friends and family, she gained a reputation for being the go-to source of discount LEGOs, to the point where Hunter and their sister, Rachel, joked that she robbed LEGO trucks in her free time and that was how she got the goods. Considering she’d never done a LEGO set in her life until a year before, this was quite an unexpected evolution of character. Every dollar earned helped make the wedding possible.
Sarah & Hunter's Super Fantastical Magical Date Log
598 pieces | LEGO: 43217 (retired)
Assembled by Sarah Wilkinson, December 2024
Interaction Rating: 4 / 5 (interaction with the set is encouraged, but use extra care)
Similar to how Carl and Ellie kept an Adventure Book in the Pixar movie, Up, detailing all the adventures they hoped to have one day, Sarah has kept some form of journal about their adventures as a couple since the very beginning. For the first year together, Sarah kept a Date Log (officially called "Sarah & Hunter's Super Fantastical Magical Date Log"), which captured details from every single date they had. It became too much to keep up with when they were seeing each other nearly every day. Hence, as Hunter prepared to move in with Sarah, she transitioned to a line-a-day journal where she could still capture key moments, but with a helpful character limit (the Date Log is 80 single-spaced pages; Sarah is known for many things, but brevity is none of them). The Lego Museum concept was only possible because the couple had such robust documentation of their story together. Most of the sets in their collection were chosen because they represented a specific memory the couple wanted to include in their storytelling. But you will also encounter some sets used primarily for decor. That's because some sets didn't tie in directly with a memory, but they were still friggin' cool.
Telling Our Story Through Bricks
363 pieces | LEGO: 31169
Assembled by Sarah Wilkinson, January 2025
Interaction Rating: 4 / 5 (interaction with the set is encouraged, but use extra care)
With entries from their Date Log and Sarah's line-a-day journal as a guide, the couple began envisioning how they could lean into the museum concept and "interpret" each brick set with storytelling. Sarah majored in writing in college, and she savors a good creative project, so she took the lead on this portion of wedding planning as Creative Director. Hunter tapped into his strengths and served as Logistics Director. At first, Sarah envisioned museum-style placards next to each set in the display, but soon realized they wouldn't have the space for that at the wedding venue. So she set about developing a website to have an individual QR code posted next to each set at the wedding. She was thrilled when they secured the domain, ourlegomuseum.com, and spent much of her free time between Christmas and Memorial Day building the website (which has over 150 individual pages). During that time, Sarah used their Date Log and line-a-day journal to write vignettes to accompany each brick set for their website (over 400 vignettes!). Her laptop keys clocked some serious miles (and, as it turned out, couldn't make it to the finish line, so she had to get a new one four months before the wedding).
How the Heck Are We Going to Display All These Bricks?!
496 pieces | Funwhole: F9030
Assembled by Hunter Williams, October 2024
Interaction Rating: 4 / 5 (interaction with the set is encouraged, but use extra care)
As the brick sets started to accumulate in the couple's home (which they share with Sarah's mom, Bonnie)—first as boxes and then as assembled sets needing shelf space—they quickly realized they would need more temporary shelving to store everything, leading up to the wedding. They filled just about every available nook and cranny with more shelving in the rooms they had control over (Bonnie's room was the only one in the house that remained Lego-free). Trying to find places to store all the brick sets in their home raised critical questions about how they would display everything at the wedding. The venue is a rental property, so it's not set up with abundant empty shelving to accommodate a museum exhibit. Fortunately, Hunter's dad, Roy, loves carpentry and has all the tools back home in Mississippi. He was happy to build braces that could be transported from Mississippi and assembled at the wedding venue with wood boards that Hunter cut to size (after their friend, Mike, created a scale model of the venue for them, and the couple mapped out the exhibit plan with exact shelving dimensions for each space). With help, they transformed the venue into a functioning gallery space with about 500 feet of custom shelving.
How the Heck Are We Going to Move All These Bricks?!
301 pieces | LEGO: 40586 (retired)
Assembled by Sarah Wilkinson, May 2025
Interaction Rating: 5 / 5 (interaction with the set is encouraged)
As Sarah and Hunter watched every available surface in their home get taken over by assembled brick sets, they had to come to terms with another serious logistical hurdle: how to move them all to the wedding venue an hour away. Assembled brick sets tend to be fragile and risk damage when being moved. The couple initially thought they could get away with taking many trips in family-owned cars and SUVs available to them, but realized it would be more efficient to bite the bullet and rent a U-Haul. That's right, they rented a 15-foot moving truck to transport...Legos. Lots and lots of Legos. They had about four days to set up the indoor exhibits. Most museums don't build new exhibits so quickly (and they have much more experience than this rag-tag team of amateurs did), but the couple managed with the help of friends and family. They even had designated helpers who were assigned to repair sets that were damaged in transit.
The Only Thing That Can Pull Us Apart
1 piece | 4KidsPrinting
Interaction Rating: 5 / 5 (interaction with the set is encouraged)
The couple wishes they could say putting this exhibit together was a wholly positive and stress-free experience. It was joyful in many ways as they relived their love story, engaged in the art of play, and learned many new skills in the process, but it wasn't without major hurdles. Their space at home was often cramped and in some state of chaos as they acquired more brick sets and tried to keep them all organized. They worried at times that they'd bitten off more than they could chew. Especially as tariffs took effect, they worried about the rising costs of pulling everything together. They experienced moments of extreme frustration, often due to some form of miscommunication. Hunter is usually pretty stress-resilient, and even he started to show cracks in his veneer at times. They worked steadily on pulling this exhibit and wedding off for an entire year, devoting much of their free time and sacrificing rest and their other hobbies. But the process also brought them closer and taught them new things about each other. They make a great team and have an incredible network of support to lean on. The only thing that can pull them apart is a giant, oversized brick separator. But even then, they'll always close the gap. Because they just click.
With Our Whole Hearts
202 pieces | MOC: 35227
Assembled by Mike Alfare, January 2025
Interaction Rating: 4 / 5 (interaction with the set is encouraged, but use extra care)
Even if you’re not a brick builder yourself or at all interested in LEGO, the couple hopes that something will spark your imagination at their Lego Museum. Creating this exhibit required countless hours from so many people (and somehow has to be cleaned up in a single day after the wedding is over!). It has truly been an act of love bringing this museum to life, and it has already sparked so much joy at a time when the world has felt very dark. Sarah and Hunter are thrilled to share the full exhibit and celebrate their love with you. Welcome to their love story as told through bricks.