We are all about Legos these days, to the point that I think I could get rid of every other toy in our house, and no one would notice!
Between our fall birthdays and Christmas, we may have every Lego Friends set except Olivia’s House, plus two big boxes of bricks. This means the bricks themselves were getting out of control as we searched for ways to organize them.
I asked for ideas more than once on the Life Your Way Facebook page, and since Lego organizing is always a hot topic, I got plenty of ideas, which we used to come up with a system that would work for us.
At first, the girls really wanted to organize the pieces by type. However, since the 4-year-old is our biggest Lego enthusiast, it just seemed like a system that was going to be way too complicated for her to keep up with. So when Christina and several other people mentioned organizing by color, I started encouraging the big girls to consider that system instead.
Eventually, they agreed, and the house above is a perfect example of how it’s turned out to be a good thing. They were afraid they wouldn’t be able to find the pieces they needed if they didn’t know what color it was, but having them sorted by color has resulted in some very pretty color schemes in their houses, which they weren’t really doing before!
I don’t know if boys do this too, but the girls not only build their houses but then spend hours playing with them, making up scenarios and acting out stories, building their houses and vehicles as they go, much as they play with their doll house.
The big girls have mastered the art of building sturdy houses, but the little ones typically build on a cookie tray (we have four of them from our road trip!), which they also use to claim and corral the pieces they’re currently using.
Over the course of a few days, we sorted the Legos into four sets of plastic Sterilite drawers (for a total of 12 drawers), organizing the bricks by color and using the fourth set of drawers for people, animals, and accessories. {Of course, those drawers stay pretty empty since they are the most sought-after pieces and, therefore, in use pretty much all of the time!}
We actually had a lot of fun sorting them, and everybody can help put the loose pieces away with this system, which is good because I imagined myself hanging a sign like at the library, “Please do not reshelve the Legos.” Truthfully, they can do it without labels (it’s pretty easy to match yellow to yellow, after all!), but who doesn’t love a pretty label when getting organized? So I created these printable labels for our drawers…and for you too if you want them!
Print the labels out on plain cardstock or on sticky paper (I used Avery Clear Full-Sheet Labels, but only because I had them already), cut along the lines, and either stick or tape the labels to the drawers.
Click here to download or print the lego labels.
How do you organize Legos?
