Consider yourselves lucky because my wife has acculamted 10 years of Dept 56 houses (I have to admit that I bought a good number of them:D ) and it now takes almost 3 pieces of plywood to setup and it fills my entire dining room. We have to do it in shifts because it takes almost 2 days to take every house and accessory out of the box. Then there is a day of deciding which houses should go where on the table (mind you if I was smarter I would draw a map one year to use!!). I usually do all of this thanksgiving weekend because after being up at 2AM on friday to go BF shopping I need to get back in the christmas spirit after dealing with all of the insane buttholes at Bestbuy, CC and TRU.
Anyway enough of me rambling in my first post...so Good Luck everybody with your BF shopping and christmas decorating!!!!!