Lego Organization

My husband’s into Lego (I learned its Lego, not Legos).  This is Ben displaying his awesome space shuttle creation at Seattle’s 2009 Lego Convention.

 

For Ben’s birthday, I decided to give him a nice organization system for his 66,000 Lego pieces.  What prompted this?  Two things:

1) Ben needed something better.  He had organized his Lego  in plastic bags that were stored in containers of various sizes and shapes.  This wasn’t the most efficient way to organize his large collection, though he was making it work.

2) I moved my desk into his office.  We’re having a baby, and two months before the due date, it was finally time to move my things out of the baby’s room so we could start getting her room ready.  The challenge was that Ben’s office was already full to capacity with his very large computer desk, shelves, Lego bins, and a long table he was using to build Lego.  We could easily fit my desk and Ben’s desk in the same room, but there wouldn’t have been any room for Ben’s Lego hobby the way it was organized then.  Plus, I wouldn’t have been able to live with those big bins everywhere.  Either Ben’s Lego had to leave or we had to find another solution.  Neither of us wanted them to leave.

This is a picture taken a few years ago in another house.  He’s collected more Lego since then and has more bins than this.

So the big question was how were we going to fit both Ben’s desk, my desk, AND all of Ben’s Lego?

After thinking and thinking, we decided to get rid of the big building table and extend his working desk.  It’s an IKEA desk, so we made the trip to IKEA and bought an attachment that extends Ben’s desk out further.  It turns out that now he has more surface space to build Lego than before. 

But what to do with all his of containers of Lego?  We looked at a few websites to give us ideas and Ben thought about it a while. Eventually, Ben would love to have a whole room devoted to this, with shelves, lots of tables, and places to display his work, but that is a way down the road.  All we have is one wall to work with now. We decided that we needed stackable, interchangeable clear containers of the same width and length, and they needed to have drawers.  I was hoping to find containers of different heights and different drawer depths.  As long as they had the same width and length and could stack on top of each other, that would be fine.  We couldn’t find anything like this, and we did look.  We visited all of the major retail and hardware stores and didn’t have any luck.  The container with two deep drawers, for example, didn’t stack with the container of three medium-size drawers.  This surprised me.  So we had to choose one type of container.  Ben decided he could organize all his Lego using 12X12-inch Sterilite containers, and this has been working great.  We bought 28 in total, clearing out the two Target stores in our area of them. 

This is our car full of 18 Sterilite containers.

Here’s Ben organizing all his Lego.

Here it is, all done (minus one bin, which we got later).

The great thing is that they all sit on one wall of our office.  They are really pretty to look at because all the different Lego color and shapes are visible through the plastic. And most important, Ben loves them and he’s able to find pieces faster than ever.