Saturday 21 July 2012

Storing and Organising Lego

To the astonishment of many, our substantial Lego collection is now sorted.


Yes, the seemingly impossible has now been achieved.


When a Lego collection gets as big as ours, it can be hard to locate that certain piece you want to make a particular creation. Sorting by colour makes the finding process just that little bit easier. We have sorted our Lego by colour for over a year now, but we have recently bought a few new boxes to streamline the process.

I do a major colour sort at the end of each school holiday, about every three months. In between times, Lego is either put away properly by colour or just put into one large Unsorted Box. Sorting this box is the task for the end of the holidays, or earlier if it gets too full too quickly. It takes about a day to sort one 50L tub, with breaks and distractions, unless I have help - which can make the task take longer, if the help consists of diverting the unsorted Lego pieces to unfinished Lego creations!

We have boxes with dividers for individual colours:


We have boxes without dividers for the black, dark grey, light grey and white pieces, since there are so many:


We have a box for the base plates:


We even have a box for all those clear pieces, and another for several hundred Lego people, several dozen horses and all their accoutrements:


Best of all, almost all of the boxes fit neatly under our bed, ready to be brought out on the weekend.

2 comments:

Mrs. Edwards said...

This is impressive and inspiring. Our collection doesn't even nearly rival yours, but even so it could use some organizing! We have several sets that are all mixed together, but I never thought to just forget about all that and sort by color. Great idea.
Amy

Sharon said...

Sorting by colour works better than sets because there are far too many generic pieces that are common to many sets, so it makes it difficult to return the pieces used in own design builds to their original sets. On the other hand, it is easy to know where things go, and to find them again, when they are sorted by colour. Except for those kids who only ever use Lego to build the sets according to the instructions, I think this is the best way to keep track of the stuff. Of course, not everyone needs such large boxes! For a long time we used two chests of drawers we had originally bought for an ensuite bathroom, but we just had to upsize.

xS