Building my LEGO SHIELD Helicarrier

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“Look what I’ve been building!”

“What are you building?”

“We’re building a house on a cliff!”

Inception

Whenever I think about building things, I think of Leo’s son in Inception telling him that excitedly after they’ve been reunited at the end of the film. (I suppose it could have some link to Dom Cobb’s role as an architect of dreams, or that Saito’s mansion in limbo is on a cliff / rock plateau; but I’m not here to analyse Inception. I just want to point out how excited the little boy sounded at the thought of building things.)

That was how I felt when I bought the LEGO SHIELD Helicarrier two years ago. It was a very expensive item that I thought long and hard over, so when I received a large sum of mall vouchers as a freebie for something else I bought, it sped up my decision to get that.

(The LEGO Movie can be thanked for my sudden re-interest in LEGOs by the way. I was a fan of The Avengers and already got the MCU Phase One box set of films, but it didn’t even occur to me that I could collect LEGO sets until I watched The LEGO Movie and was inspired to build things again.)

I spent about two and a half days building it. I could have spent two days on it, and I’m sure that LEGO master builders could have done it in less than a day, but since I’m not one of them and I also like to do things like eat and sleep, I took my time. You can see my progress below.

It was fun building it, though after a while, my fingers started to hurt from the knobbly bits sticking out of the LEGO bricks. And then it became a little monotonous, because you’re just following the instructions. (This is the perfect time to catch up on videos and whatever else that doesn’t need a whole lot of concentration.) But I felt such a sense of accomplishment when it was done!

Then came the part where I had to figure out where to put it, which was not a consideration that I made when buying the LEGO set. Luckily, my desk is pretty large, so I could devote about a third of the space to this behemoth.

Unfortunately, like everything else in my room, the LEGO set starts to collect dust if not dusted every so often — something I learnt from a smaller Avengers LEGO set that I owned (and decided to dismantle and keep in my cupboard for that reason). I’m not about to dismantle something that I took two days to build, so I dust it every two or three weeks. It’s kind of a pain in the ass though, but at least my table is fairly clean, since I make it a point to dust my table and all its contents when I’m dusting the LEGO set. (I’m starting to come round to the idea of dismantling it though, because I just realised that dust gets into the spaces *inside* the stacked bricks too. But I’ll see.)

Do I regret getting it even though it’s a pain in my ass? I can’t say I do. The Helicarrier is something that I absolutely *needed* to remind me that I literally do not have space to put them whenever I am tempted to buy things like the LEGO Death Star or the LEGO Disney Castle — and you won’t believe how constantly I have to remind myself of that. I don’t even have space to put the boxes they come in, even if I decide not to build them at the moment. I was intending to collect more Marvel LEGO sets (and other sets), but I had to rethink those plans because of the above problem.

But it is so tempting! So, so tempting. Perhaps next time, if I get a bigger house…