LEGO Tips and Techniques - Holiday Pick A Brick, My Haul

Back at the end of February I discussed the size and LEGO capacity of the Holiday Pick A Brick box.  I finally got around to filling the box.  Unfortunately my local store did not have the best selection of what I needed but I did what I could to fill the box.

By way of reminder, the box is 11x11x9 1x1 bricks in size.  This is precisely 3267 1x1 plates.  The pyramid lid brings this total up to about 3500 1x1 plates.  I'll be judging my performance based on the amount of 1x1 plate equivalent I was able to fit into the box.

The first thing I did was build a fat 4x8x9 block out of 1x4 tan bricks.  In retrospect I should have built it at 4x7x9 or 4x11x9.  Oh well.  I built the same size block out of 1x2 and 1x4 reddish brown as well as some 1x4 green.  Each of these blocks would be 864 units (4x8x9x3) for a total of 1728.

I then made 5 stacks of black 1x4 bricks, 9 high.  These total to 540 units.  Eleven yellow 1x6 bricks add 198 units.  Between 45 blue and yellow 1x4 plates I added another 180 units.  Blue and yellow aren't really my colors but by the time I got to those I was a bit desperate to fill space.  I also stagger stacked them for ease of use later.  I lost 1 unit for each one.

Fourteen 1x2 45° slopes count for 4.5 units each for a total of 63.  Some 1x2 single finger click hinges (for micropolis detailing) would be about 2.5 units each though you'd be hard pressed to pack them in to that density.  Nonetheless the 13 of them add 33 units.

One of the best grabs was a slew of black, white, and blue 1x8 tiles.  I made little effort to line them up perfectly but they did fit into a smaller area so I feel like I got a fairly good use of space.  There were 57 in all for a total of 456 units.

By this time it was 12:30p and I was getting shaky from too much coffee and too little food.  I threw 6 dark bley 4x4 plates in the top staggered a bit to fill the pyramid.  These gave me another 96 units.  Finally I chucked a small handful of flower sprues in just before closing the lid.  How do you quantify the relative size of these?  At first glance they seem like about 5 each but I'm going to bump that to 7.  The flowers are a bit bigger in diameter than a 1x1 plate.  Nine sprues add a final count of 63 to the total.

In all there are 1728 + 540 + 198 + 180 + 63 + 33 + 456 + 96 + 63 = 3357 units.  Out of 3500 available I got 3357 / 3500 = 96%.  Some of you will be amazed while others of you will say, "That's all?"  Like I said, caffeine shakes as well as poor variety of parts I really needed kept me from optimizing the box.  Nonetheless it was a free LEGO pieces so I can't complain.

How well did you do on your box?