Dept 56 Snow Village Gallery II

 

I no longer set up the village on the floor because somewhat because of limited room, but mostly because we have cats! This has necessitated putting the village up which also limits my space. But I do have 5 areas and 2 of them hold the majority of pieces.

As of Christmas 2023 I have 84 lighted houses/buildings. The body count on the figures is 409.

 

Shelf Village

Starting in the fall of 2016 we started our new yearly routine of spending half the year in Wisconsin and the other half in Arizona. So the village would obviously be set up in Arizona, but now we had two cats. It was agreed that setting up on the floor was too risky and since there was limited space anyway, I would set up the village on shelfs. There are a couple of advantages: (1) seeing the village is another experience when able to view at eye level, and (2) the setup is easier. I have 4 areas to hold the vast majority of pieces, but can't display all the houses and almost none of the large assessory pieces.

On a cubby hole shelf in our Arizona house we keep this very small display all year long.

But the two main display areas were horribly small severely limiting the display. The half wall (used for houses) was just 9' X 13" and the long shelf above the gas fireplace (for the downtown) was 16' X 17". The pictures below show how each was extended. For the houses I added a pair of 60" X 18" folding tables, and for the long shelf, I bought a 8' X 4' sheet of pegboard and cut in half to get two 8' X 24" pieces. Though this only added 7 inches of depth (now 24" total), it not only added more room for buildings, I could also again display the streetcar. The picture at the right shows all of the boxes for the displays before everything is taken out. Those large white banker's boxes are used to extend the table length.

The pictures below show the village with the extended areas.

In 2023, another 16" X 6' table was added.