If you find yourself reading the title and going, “What the hell am I going to do with a stable?” Well … let me know when you come up with an answer. I’m still working on that one myself.
But, as has become one of my taglines, we can’t really turn down good-looking playsets these days when it comes to 6-inch. Even when they are intended for girls lin — oh! but I got this at Target! They technically don’t have “pink” aisles anymore, and nothing is labeled specifically for girls or boys. Whew. Masculinity preserved.
Jokes aside, these LORI playsets have been on folks of the Fwoosh’s radar for a little bit now, with their loft house and dance studio sets making really nice setups for other dios or playsets. The loft was very tempting, except for me it does the job too well — I would hate to rip out any of that interior work to make something different. So it would have to stay as Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne’s swank modern townhouse, and I don’t have major drive for that. At least not today.
This stable, on the other hand, was much more utilitarian and pretty timeless. Even its factory colors really aren’t bad. There’s quite a few accessories and features in it, like LED lamps and some kind of water-spraying pump, in addition to the obvious ones like functioning stable doors, some fencing, and farm tools.
To see if this could be something I could use, I mostly just worked on painting it to a more worn finish. I hit it with a few different colors of vinyl dye, then some airbrush, then some Tamiya weathering — just trying to get a little grime onto the sculpted wood. At its current point, I’d say I’m 70 percent there; I need to do some more brushwork, but this was at least wood-colored enough to demonstrate. And other than that, I boarded up the window with a top from one of those old ToyBiz crates and started to fill in the inside with some storage space, like a cabinet and a small bench. Not at all a finished custom, but that was sort of my intent — I haven’t decided on anything specific, so I hoped maybe showing it part way like this might spark one of you guys to go, “Oh! I can use it for ‘X’!” which is sometimes hard when you see a completed project.
In its intended function, you know, as a stable, I think it works really well, especially with our standard go-to 6-inch scale horses from LOTR. The stalls are plenty big enough for other animals and such, but I could also see hiding some motorcycles in here, like it’s an outlaw biker hideout. It also evokes in me a little of those old 21st Century Toys WW2 dio sets, with the destroyed haylofts and farmhouses you could set your 1:18 soldiers in. The stables themselves offer a decent amount of space, add that to the storage area on the side and the attic space above, and you could cram an impressive amount of figures and gear into this set.
As a set piece, it’s just big enough to make use of without being overwhelming, so setting this up as a backdrop for some rural-themed pictures is definitely possible. And at around $30, it’s a pretty substantial set, with some potentially useful accessories too. But is it for you? Got me, fellas. I’m still trying to figure out what my plan for it is. Let me know if you have any particular awesome ideas below, and if you’d be interested in me revisiting this one in the future.
