Our Lego Storage System

We love LEGO at our house. I figure that if you calculated the amount of money spent per hour of play time, LEGOS are by far our best toy investment. They are the only toy we own that my kids play with every single day. I also love that LEGOS foster creativity and imaginative play in my children. I am always amazed at the clever things they build.

Do you have LEGO lovers at your house too? If you do, you’ll know that one of the challenges of LEGOS is how to store them and most importantly, how to keep them off the floor where you might step on them… ouch!

We have tried several different methods for organizing LEGOS and I am finally happy with our current system. The best part about our LEGO storage system is that it is easy and inexpensive.

This is our system: We sort our LEGOS by color into a tall plastic drawer cart that sits inside the closet of the kids’ bedroom.

We’ve tried other organization methods, but we keep coming back to sorting by color. Whether my kids are building something from an instruction booklet or from their imagination, they know right where to look for the pieces they need.

Here’s a peek at some of our drawers. They’re kind of pretty, aren’t they?!

The key element of making this sorting method work is to have a “dump-all” bucket.

We use the plastic bin that came with our LEGO Classic set as our dump-all bucket. We keep it on the Lego table so that when the kids are done working on a building project, they can just dump all of the extra pieces into the bucket. When the bucket starts getting full, we go through it together and sort the pieces back into the drawers. It’s a great system and it has totally saved my sanity when it comes to cleaning up LEGOS.

My kids have loved the LEGO Classic products. They love the freedom of the “no instructions necessary” building. Look at this cute park I found this week:

See the little bench and the arch and the pool with hot tub? Gah! So cute! I love peeking into their room and seeing what they are working on. Their little scenes are so creative.

I challenged my kids to build something unusual and they came up with such a fun idea. I posted a little video of it over on Instagram. Go check it out. I think you’ll be surprised!

Here are three fun LEGO building ideas to get your child’s creativity flowing:

• Warm up to building. Building can be satisfying and fun even if it’s simple. Try a tower-building exercise to get your creative juices flowing. Take a pile of bricks and build a tower of any height or width – your only constraints are to start and end with your favorite color. Why? Building is intuitive. A sure-fire way to unlock your creativity is to just start clicking bricks together. Giving yourself a simple exercise with one or two guidelines is an easy way to get started.
• Build your world. Look around right now. Are you in the kitchen? Outside on the porch? In your family room? Focus on a favorite object and try and build it. Don’t dwell on the details just focus on the general shape or color and add one distinguishing detail.
• The bricks tell a story. Ask yourself a question and build the answer. Start with something simple like, “What’s my favorite day of the week?” and then build what Thursday looks like to you. Share the story out loud even if you’re by yourself. Why? The act of snapping bricks together helps us come to decisions and formulate ideas faster and more clearly. You’ll find if you set out to build an answer to a question that the building flows easily and you’ll amaze yourself with your skills and insights.