Lego Storage and Organization: Spring Cleaning Week

I am continuing my Spring Cleaning series week by tackling Lego storage. If your kiddos love Legos, you know my pain (literally--have you ever stepped on one of them?). It got out of control quickly after a Lego-themed birthday party. We had everything in a few plastic bins but I realized it wasn't conducive to building, and, if I felt overwhelmed when opening the bin, surely my 5-year old did too.

So, to Pinterest I went! I found many options that moms use to organize Legos. There is grouping legos by color, which seemed to be the most popular option. Though that is an awesome way to quickly put Legos away in a pinch, I thought it was just a more organized version of the solution I already had in place and didn't make building any easier.

I sat down with a pile of manuals from all the various Lego kits MiniB had received. Most had been put together and torn down into fragments. I tried to put the below one together and found it impossible in the current state of our Lego organization.

So, I came to the conclusion that the best option is to group Legos by their shape and function. That is, all squares together, all flat pieces together, all Lego people bodies together, etc. Luckily, Target had the following on sale!

I then dumped everything out on MiniB's floor to begin sorting. Yikes!

It took me a good two hours to sort everything into piles.

Now to sort them into their storage cases. First, all the Lego bodies, heads, hats and weapons. I used my label maker (one of my favorite things, read here).

There were plenty of flat pieces to store too.

Then, I took this large Lego Storage Head that we got for Christmas and put all of the "regular" lego pieces--squares, medium bricks, and large bricks.

Then, I put all the "irregular" pieces into the Lego storage drawers I got at Target. We put my son's initials on the outside of one of the drawers for fun.

They came with handy plastic separators. I considered irregular pieces those that are unusual shaped, tires, props or tools, doors, windows, and anything unique.

I didn't want to tear down the partial projects so I reserved an entire drawer for projects that were partially put together.

Here is our completed storage set up! MiniB is so excited and we sat down and attempted build one of the projects from the manual from scratch. It was so easy and fun! Which leads me to tomorrow's topic, storing and organizing all of the Lego manuals so you can rebuild projects again and again.