How Many Funko Pops is Too Many, Mathematically? We Counted 1058
There’s a good chance you already think I’m insane just from the title. “How exactly are you about to justify a four-digit number of anything? Why is that number so oddly specific?” you’re asking. “Who is this person, and how are they writing from Arkham?”
To quickly answer your questions: rice, math, Connie, it looks amazingly like my office desk.
Look, we love our stuff. We love showing off our stuff. We love spending all of our fun money on it. And for those us fortunate enough to have our own spaces to decorate, we tend to go ham, and sometimes we run out of reasonable display space and it starts taking over everything.
I collect replica swords – I used to live in a small space and couldn’t display everything like I wanted, so one became a piece of the recliner, and I named the seat Sword Couch. Sword Couch bites and does not apologize. After that, I became a master of high shelf wall display (note: not actually a master).
Funko Pops don’t seem like they take up a lot of room until you start collecting them. How do we find prime real estate for these adorable figurines without sacrificing display or all of our other stuff?
The answer is not to have fewer Pops. We just have to use some math.
Statistics
For the purposes of this exercise, we’re going to be working with a lot of averages, just so we can see the bigger picture.
The average size house in America is a 3 bed 2 bath with 2,500 square feet and has 8-foot tall walls. No, we’re not going to get rid of/replace your furniture with Pops. We’re trying to be reasonable here, Cody, so we’re assuming that you have some semblance of furniture and also collect other things, but on a much smaller scale than your ever-growing Pop collection.
We’re working with just the standard Pop figure box that is 3.5L x 4.5W x 6.25H inches. No larger boxes, no set pieces. And no display cases, either – they can look really cool, but honestly, they take up a lot of real estate.
Most of the Pops will be displayed above the 5.5-foot mark, which gives you the most available room for everything else in your life. For cost efficiency, all shelves can be made out of 2x4s and wall brackets from your local hardware store.
The images we’re adding are of how other people have displayed Pops in their homes. These are fantastic ways to display your Pop collection, but we’re bringing things up onto the walls for the most part so that you’re not actually sacrificing too much space to get to our 1,058 number; these images prove that, if you have the room, you could easily double this number.
Living room
Let’s start with all that empty space above your TV. Most of us have our TVs on a stand or mounted on a wall, with the top of it being around 5.5’ high. That’s a lot of space above your TV you’re wasting, my friend.
The average TV size in America is 47”, with a width of 41”. Your first shelf will be built about 6 inches above the TV.
On a 42” wide shelf, we can comfortably put 9 Pops side by side. And because they’re only 6.5” tall, let’s do two rows on top of each other. 13” of Pops with the 2” of plywood, add an inch for a gap, and you’ve displayed your first 18 Pops in your living room.
But hold on! You have 2.5’ above your TV. Let’s add another shelf that can hold another single row of Pops. That’s so much extra space. Now you have 27!
I’m assuming we all have a bookshelf or two somewhere in our living room, right? If not… well, today’s the day! A standard tall bookcase is 7’ tall, which means you can still put a row of Pops up there!
And if you’re not using a shelf or two on the bookcase… well, that’s another two rows of Pops per shelf. At 31 inches wide, that’s 6 Pops (with a little gap) per row. The top of the bookcase plus two shelves nets you another 30 Pops per bookcase while still carrying a decent amount of books, which will level out not only the bookcase but the weird looks that you might get from having 30 Pops on a bookcase. If you have two bookcases, you have enough room for 60 Pops, making your current living room total 87.
Assuming you don’t have kids who still jump on the couches, you have plenty of space above your couch, too. We’re going back to the same shelves we used above the TV (get used to that, there’s a lot more where that came from).
An average three-seater couch is 84” wide. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create two shelves above your sofa that are 81” wide each. The math isn’t hard, let’s do it together: you can fit 18 Pops per row on 81” of shelving. Three rows of 18 nets you 54 displayed Pops above your couch and gives you a very reasonable living room total of 141.
But we love Pops, and we collect them with no end in sight, and we need more room. We always need more room. Between extra shelf space on your TV stand, coffee tables, and end tables, you can, at the very least, round that total to 150.
Kitchen and bathrooms
Nope. We’re not putting any in these rooms. “But there’s so much space!” Yes, in steamy rooms. We’re collectors – we’re not putting cardboard boxes in room where the steam can damage them. Hard pass. We’re talking about reasonable space here.
Office/Kid’s rooms
There are three bedrooms in this house we’re using. If you don’t have kids, there’s a good chance one of these is an office. If you do have kids… well, let them hang their posters and stuff underneath the shelves. You’ll just have to negotiate with them on what themes the Pops are – they should get a say in their own room, after all.
The average size of these “smaller” bedrooms is 11 x 12 feet. Assuming two doors (one for the closet) and a 3-foot window, that’s 9 feet of space we can’t really do much with but we can still put a single row of 8 Pops above the frames. That’s still 37 feet of walls we can add shelving to, and to continue justifying the space, we’re going to keep everything above 5.5 feet.
There’s still room for all the standard furniture – beds, dressers, office desks, file cabinets… whatever you need. Let’s shave off 2 feet for where the corners meet (you can’t display them hidden from each other, that’s the rule, I just made it up) for a total of close to 35 feet. A row of Pops in this room yields you another 92, with the three rows bringing the total to 276 per room.
If you have two of these rooms to play with, that’s 552 Pops, with plenty of space for everything you still need and want in your rooms.
Dining room
Generally speaking, there’s not a lot of shelf space here. Usually with only one wall (or two half walls), we can’t put too many in here. That’s okay, though, there’s still some space!
Get rid of the flowers in the center of your table. Who needs constantly dying plants when you can display some more Pops? The dishes in your cabinet don’t have feelings so they won’t be hurt if you stack them a little bit closer together and display some more boxes on the shelves.
All in all, just so that people aren’t perturbed while they’re trying to eat, let’s call it a cool 20 Pops that you can display in here without getting in the way.
Master bedroom
Don’t think we forgot about this room. Of course, the main bedroom is generally larger than the other ones, so let’s call this one 14 x 14 with an additional door (maybe you have two closets, we don’t want to discount that).
Same concept – everything fits in your room, but you use higher space for Pops. Four rows yields you 336 Pops for this room. (Hint for more Pops: The top of your dresser is also a shelf)
What have we learned today?
We have the space in our homes to display our collectibles and valuables without breaking the bank (which means more money for Pops).
We’ve already justified the room for 1,058 Funko Pops. But we’re cunning folk, right? Of course we are! Every living space is different, and I’m sure you have spaces in your house that I haven’t covered here – I was intentional in this so that you can use what you’ve learned to customize your other spaces as well.
I believe in you, and I believe that in your 2,500 square foot house, you can get another 150 Funko Pops (at minimum) reasonably displayed while not taking away any of the furniture, storage space, or aesthetic (Who are we kidding? This will add to the aesthetic) in your house.
We definitely could have added more – spaces on blank walls can have shelves upon shelves loaded onto the walls. I left you space to display all the other cool stuff you have – while we love Pops, they’re not the only things we like.
Decorate your home to the max without hoarding and becoming “that guy” to your circle of friends.