Hey it's Abby and today I wanted to talk a little bit about Lego organization. I
mentioned when I did my boys playroom tour that I had some very definite
thoughts and opinions when it came to organizing Legos and a bunch of you said
"can you do a video on that?" so today is the day and I can't wait to get into it.
So I will definitely show you the Lego system that we are using currently but I
wanted to make sure I said right up front that Legos are one of those things
where I feel like it's gonna be different for everybody. The best Lego
organization system for you and for your house is going to depend a lot on how
your kids like to play with Legos so what's perfect for us might not be
perfect for you and that's okay. When we first brought Legos into our house a
couple years ago, I was determined that I was going to keep them organized by set
so I would put all the pieces from each set in a big ziploc bag and I stored
them all in fabric bins in our toy storage unit and that is how I wanted to
store them. My boys had other ideas though. They didn't really like to keep
putting the sets together over and over again. They were more interested in
mixing and matching the pieces and building their own creations so I would
get really frustrated because they would get all the Ziploc bags out and mix up
the pieces and it would take me forever to figure out which pieces went in which
bags. Now if your kids like to build the sets and that's their favorite thing to
do that could be the perfect solution for you, but for us and the way that my
boys wanted to play with them, it did not work very well and it just caused
frustration for me and for them. So the next system I tried was to organize the
Legos by color. I had seen it all over the internet. Lots of different people
organize their Legos by color and it looks beautiful and it looked organized
and so I figured if we couldn't do it by set we were gonna organize by color. So I
took a day, I sorted everything out, I used one of these TROFAST organizers
from Ikea, and we had all the Legos organized by color. It looked great and
we stuck with that system for about six months but what ended up happening
that, again, my boys just kind of wanted to free play with the Legos so they
would get out a bunch of Legos they would mix up all the colors and build
their creations like I wanted them to do but then when it was time to clean up it
was taking us a long time to separate all the colors back out and put
everything away. So what we would end up doing is it would be bedtime, we were
trying to clean up, we'd be in a hurry and we would just leave a pile of Legos
on the Lego table pretty much at all times
because we didn't want to take the time to separate them all out by color again.
It was around that time that I read Marie Kondo's book 'The Life-Changing
Magic of Tidying Up' and one of the things she talked about in that book was
making sure it was easy to put your items away and when I read that
something clicked with me and our Lego system. It definitely wasn't easy to put
away with the way that my boys wanted to play with their Legos when we had
them organized by color. After we abandoned the color coding
system, we pretty much moved to what wehave now and that is we have two TROFAST
units and all of the Legos are just mixed together and it's my
organizational self that kind of made me cringe a little bit at first but truly
that is what my boys wanted. They wanted it all together. They find random pieces,
they put them together, they make their creations, and then it's really easy for
them to put it away. The only thing we have separated out is we do have one bin
that has the pieces for the Lego guys and it's the only one that's labeled. It
says "Lego guys" because Caleb, my six-year-old, really likes the guys the
best and then he can easily find all the pieces and create little figures. Then we
also made a place where they could store their finished creations. So what they do when
they first get a new Lego set, they go and they follow the instructions and
they put them together and I wanted to have a place where they could display
those where they would be safe and wouldn't get messed up. So we put in
shelves in the closet in their playroom and so we have a whole display area
where they can display their finished creations. They usually stay there for a
few months before the boys you know end up playing with them, pieces get broken off,
and then they end up going with the rest of the Legos back
into the general LEGO fray over here but that has been working really well
for us because they can keep the completed sets for a while and look at
them and then they just get put back into our system. So the final piece to
our LEGO organization system is a way to store the booklets. I just have a
little file box in the bottom of the closet. It holds all the booklets. I have
them organized by type so all the Star Wars Lego booklets are together, all the
LEGO City booklets, all the Ninjago booklets, and that way if they are
wanting to look for a certain booklet it's really easy for them to go in there
and find the one they want. I have almost been tempted to even get
rid of the booklets that we're done with once the pieces are all mixed together
but it never fails that just about the time that I'm about to throw all the
booklets out they come to me and they ask for one. So, for right now, I'm keeping
them. At least they're organized, they don't take up much space, and they're
easy for the boys to find and those three blue folders kind of right in the
back of the box are different building systems other than LEGO. So like K'NEX
and Bionicles and things like that. So those are my thoughts on Lego
organization and again what works for us might not work for you. I'd love to hear
what's working for your family when it comes to Lego organization so be sure to
let me know in the comments below!