LEGO storage

19 March 2014


I have been trying to come up with a good solution for LEGO storage. My boys love them, but there are SO many darn little pieces, a pain to put away,  a step on them in the middle of the night in your bare feet and you feel like breathing destructive, incinerating dragon breath every last one.
But I love them because they aren’t tv, the ipad, or technology. Girls and boys love them. They use their brains and imaginations to create and for that reason alone we are still friends.
When this baby showed up for $10 on our local online classifieds late one night (like Craigslist, but here they call it ksl classifieds)lego storage I screamed and texted as fast as my little fingers could telling her I could bring cash and come first thing in the morning and made it sound like I was as harmless and kind as a mom could be so that she would trust coming to her house. (do you do that when you are trying to score something on Craigslist?) And I got it!! It seemed like a perfect thing to organize and corral all of those LEGOS.



On a blustery Saturday, we dumped out that big container you see up on the right there and began separating. It took a good 2 hours and these boys lasted for about 20 minutes.

We have a LOT of gray legos --- we used 2 drawers for them:lego storage bins

and hardly any orange legos --- hmmm.lego storage drawers

I hot glued a lego on the outside of each drawer to show which color was in each:lego on the outside to show color
It may not stay this organized, but right now it feels SO much better and it’s fun watching the boys not have to dig forever for the piece they are looking for. I’ll keep you posted (well, let’s be honest, if you remind me I will) on how it lasts, but we’ll see.
I guess I didn’t realize how expensive these organizers were – here they are on Amazon, but I have seen these colored scrapbook paper cases at Costco and Michaels that may work just as well?
Here are a few other past posts on organizing kids’ stuff:

Tell me your feelings about LEGOs. Do you love/hate them? Do you have a system for them? Do you keep the random little ones you find here and there or do you chuck them? You can tell us…
photo signature_zps45983bca.jpg

16 comments

  1. Goodness... I'm embarrassed to say that as a preschool teacher I LOVE lego, but as a mom of two young boys... I banned them from the house, it's too much for me. But I'm thinking maybe I'm too nutty about organizing them, in the classroom I have them by shape (roughly). Maybe at home a color system would be simpler. I'm definitely interested to see how it plays out!

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  3. My now grown sons and daughters (and their friends), were LEGO enthusiasts, and I spent many hours listening to the sound of children shoving and sorting through the plastic blocks. My kids were not the type who would meticulously put away each color and type of block, so our organization/clean-up/keep-feet-safe-from-strays system was simple: spread a large flat sheet on the floor. Place all LEGO pieces in the center of the sheet. Bring together the sheet corners (and extra fabric) to make a humongous bag. Lift and place the entire bundle in a large container (we used an 18 gallon plastic bin with a separate lid). When the kids want to play LEGOs, lift out the entire bag and set it on the floor. Spread out the sheet. This is the designated LEGO play area. LEGO's are NOT allowed off the sheet. To clean-up, bring together the sheet corners, lift the bundle into the plastic bin, cover. Done.

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    1. So smart! My mother in law tried the sheet once, but somehow they still ended up all over the house. It's hard with little kids that carry them off too.

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  4. Our LEGO solution is not nearly as practical or colorful as yours....we have playroom that's at least 80% LEGO--they stay in there and I rarely go in there. Ha!

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    1. I like the idea of designating one room where the Legos are allowed. And shutting the door!

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  5. We have a Lego room, too! So much easier - all communal Legos stay in the play room, and personal Legos must stay either in the walk in closet (older DS) or only on the desk (younger DS.) Other than that, I've given up!

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  6. My son, now 16, was (and still is for the engineering Legos) a Lego fan. Over the years, we have collected quite a mass of different sets. There were the Star Wars set, the robot set, the set that built houses, the extra pieces, etc. For my son, he didn't care that sets were sorted by color, it was more all about keeping sets together and not losing pieces. The solution I found for this sort of organizing was jumbo sized Ziplock storage bags. They came out with them a few years ago. I found the bag was large enough to hold all the set's pieces and the cover off the box showing a picture of the final product and the instructions all in one bag. He loved it! On the top shelf of his closet are all these bags piled up of the Lego sets he owns. His room is so tiny that we cannot fit a nice drawer system like you are using, even if we wanted to! But for cramped spaces, the jumbo Ziplock bags worked great!

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    1. So when the set gets taken apart, you keep all of the pieces together with the instructions? Very clever and so organized!

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  7. Aaah! The Lego Love/Hate Relationship. We had a huge bin with all our legos (isn't that generous of me to call them "our" legos) and the boys would dump the whole thing over to find their pieces. So I commandeered a storage shelf that was being under-used and bought some colored plastic rectangular bins at the dollar store. Like you, we sorted the legos by color and we have a special bin for people and their accessories and another for those odd specialty parts. My boys can read, so I just had to label them. It seems to be working better and they use the legos more than they did before (when it was too frustrating to find pieces). My husband never had legos because he said his mother was afraid he'd swallow them (she was a tad bit overprotective), but I have a sneaking suspicion it was because she was OCD and didn't want to deal with the possible mess.

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  8. Ah, that is such a great idea! Wish I had thought of this when my little brother was still in his lego phase.

    Since you love DIY, it would be great if you could check out my recent blog post which talks about how to make your own photograph coasters.

    You can find the post here: http://shradhabhatia.com/2014/03/diy-photograph-coasters/

    It would be great to get some feedback from an iconic DIY blogger like yourself!

    Keep up the great content <3

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  9. Melissa I'm envious of your deal! Except I would need at least 3 of those things I think...I wish I would have started off the way the commentor Meeny Moe said...much more practical! We have kept all the instructions over the years. (But I sure as heck am NOT going back and putting all those sets together in my mass jumbled boxes of pieces!:)

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  10. We love Legos too! We have a designated table just for Lego play. . . in our dining room. We keep the sets together as much as possible (and store in large bins when we need the table) and have a separate big bin for free building. Here is a cool article about what one guy did, and which I would love to do if I had the time - but ours wouldn't be quite so cool, or large! http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=28751376

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  11. Wow that colourful drawer storage is simply amazing. It not only helps to keep the Legos in place but it makes the entire location look more fun and interactive too. For us at home, we have wrapped up used shoeboxes with coloured papers according to the colours of the Lego pieces. Yes the process does take quite some time and effort but it was kind of fun and engaging with the children. However, after a period of time, I noticed that different coloured boxes now contain all sorts of different coloured Legos. Well, at least they all stay concealed inside.

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