Everything is Awesome…when your legos are organized

If you have children, especially boys, chances are you have legos in your house.  Legos are the perfect toy in my opinion.  They encourage creativity, can foster math and engineering skills, and are good for group or solo play.  The only drawback is keeping them contained.  

My boys will spread them out all over the carpet.  I am constantly vacuuming up the little pieces.  If you have a baby in the house, legos can be a choking hazard.

Our lego sets go through phases.  When a new set is bought, obviously my boys want to build the set exactly as the directions outline.  They are then played with in this form.  Eventually, the original set gets broken into individual pieces and that is when legos come in need of some organizing.  We seem to have received at least one set per birthday and Christmas for the last 10plus years times 2 boys so we have a lot of legos.

We tried organizing them with a lego table at one point.  Lego tables provide a building space on top of the table with drawers underneath for storage.  It is good for many reasons, but I found with our smaller bedrooms that the table just took up too much space.  And, as my boys got older the table didn’t really fit their needs.  What is working for us now is this:

Sort Legos by Color

  

Put into Bins

We have two bins.  One holds all the colored legos and one holds all the gray/white/black legos.  The bins fit into a storage shelf unit in my sons room and are out of the way when he is not playing with them.

Specialty pieces and “lego guys” go into smaller bins.

Put Some on Display

This past summer I found a fun project here(frugalfun4boys) that helped display some of my son’s favorite lego characters and some smaller pieces he built.

We also display some of his current creations on top of a bookshelf and keep all of the instruction booklets here.  My boys will often pull out old instructions and rebuild old sets.  Storing the legos in mass rather than in sets also encourages them to be creative and build their own originals.  I like seeing them do both.

The bin/color organization method also works because it is easier to clean up.  My boys will dump the legos onto a blanket to play.  Then lift the blanket and dump back into the bin when they are done.  I use cookie sheets as a tray to put the project they are currently working on and keep the pieces they have sorted out.

While I am a toy purger and have gotten rid of most toys as my kids outgrew them, I cannot give up the legos.  My brother saved all his sets and now his kids love to play with them.  Legos are one of those timeless toys.  Even my 16 year old occasionally sits down and builds with his brother (age 12).  All our cousins love to pull them out and build together.  Enjoy your legos!  I hope this post helps with keeping them in order.

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