Organizing your Lego
It happens.
Perhaps you’ve got a Lego set or two and you’ve disassembled them in order to make some creation of your own.
Maybe you bought a big box of bricks on sale at your local store.
Perhaps you bought a bulk box of used bricks from someone who’d cleaned out their attic.
Whatever the reason, you’re now faced with a big pile of bricks that’s in dire need of organizing, because it’s no fun to spend ten minutes looking for every piece you need.
Oh, by the way… if you bought used bricks or bulk lots, you really should CLEAN THEM before you go any further.
SORTING: Creating order from chaos.
The first step is to decide the best approach to organizing your bricks. There are three main schools of thought on this:
Sort by colour.
Sort by type.
Sort by both.
When I first started organizing my collection, I did what nearly everyone does - sort by colour. If you’re the kind of person who builds things freestyle, where the colour of the piece you need is more important than the type of piece, this might work well for you.
But if you do need a specific type of piece, it could take a long time to find it, which makes the time you spent organizing your stuff rather pointless.
For example, let’s say you need a 1x1 round black plate:
And you’ve put all your black pieces in one container. It can be maddening to find that piece.
But it’s a lot easier to find a black 1x1 round plate in a container full of 1x1 round plates.
Obviously, that piece is very easy to find because it’s the only black piece in the container. But even if you’ve got a container full of all the colours, it’s still much easier to find the proper colour than it is to find the proper piece in a bin of the same colour.
When your collection starts to get larger, it might happen that you need to begin sorting your parts by both colour and type. This is especially true when the parts are very small. Generally speaking, the larger the part, the easier it will be to find in a container. Small pieces like the 1x2 Door Rail bricks in the photo above will be harder to find than large pieces like the 8x8 corners in the photo below.
Generally speaking, I’ve found that the best option is to sort everything in stages, which then become more and more specific as your collection grows. When you’ve got a small collection, it might be fine to sort by category:
bricks
plates
doors and windows
Technic
Then as your collection gets larger, you might subdivide those categories into more specific categories:
small bricks
large bricks
curved bricks
small plates
large plates
doors and windows
Technic bricks
Technic axles and gears
Technic panels
Large collections will likely need even further divisions. Basically, when a container of parts becomes unruly - either because it’s too full, or because it’s too difficult to find the piece you need - then it’s time to subdivide the pieces in that container into more specific categories.
When my collection hit around 50,000 pieces, I had sorted them all by type and size. So the 1x1 bricks were in a bin, the 1x2 bricks in another bin, the 2x2 bricks in a third bin, etc. There were quite a few bins!
As you can see, I had lots of different kinds of containers - plastic totes, clear storage bins, coffee cans, drawer units, tackle boxes… and I learned which ones worked well and which ones didn’t…. but more on that later. We’re still sorting!
Oh, those tiny pieces are nasty to sort. The tubs of 1x1 tiles, plates, and bricks were maddening - until I got an idea. If you’ve got a lot of small parts to sort, get yourself a Pill Counter. They’re cheap, they’re available on lots of online shopping sites, and they are a game-changer when it comes to sorting.
Not everything will need to be sorted down into individual colours. Sometimes, you only have a few pieces of a certain type, and you can just toss all of those together. Other times, you’ll need to whittle down and use a separate container for each colour. Most of the time, you can get by with grouping your colours. I will often start out with all the colours in a single bin. When that gets nearly full, I’ll separate it into three containers:
black/white/greys
browns and tans
everything else
When those get nearly full, I’ll separate the greys from the black/whites, I’ll separate the dark browns from the tans, and I’ll separate the ‘everything else’ into warm colours and cool colours.
Eventually, you might need to drill down even further. That’s when you get into containers separated by individual colours.
All of this effort makes finding the piece you want in the colour you need much, much faster. Having them all in the little drawer cabinets right there in front of you makes it almost effortless to build anything you like. Sometimes, though, even your single-colour containers will fill up and then what? At first, I would move them to a larger container… from a drawer tray to a small bin, then to a medium bin, then to a larger bin, etc. That didn’t work well, though, as the larger bins weren’t easily accessible while I was building and I kept having to get more and more containers. That’s when I thought of another idea. One of those drawers might hold several hundred of the smallest parts or several dozen of the slightly larger ones. But how often do I build something that would require ALL of them? It’s rare. So rather than continue swapping out containers for larger ones, I simply left the parts in the drawer trays and stuck the extra ones that wouldn’t fit in the tray into ziplock bags.
They’re here if I need them, they’re out of the way if I don’t.
To remind myself which trays have a bag of overflow parts, I got some little coloured dot stickers and put those on the drawers for those pieces.
Equipment
Once you’ve decided how to organize your collection, you’ll need to figure out what kinds of containers work best for you. This is going to come down mostly to how much space you’ve got. For most pieces, I’ve found that drawer cabinets like the kind used to hold craft supplies or nuts and bolts work really well. The drawers are removable, so you can take them out if needed, then easily put them back into place when you’re done. I’m in Canada, and the Mastercraft series of drawer cabinets are usually in stock at my local Canadian Tire store, sometimes even on sale. They’re stackable, wall-mountable, and the drawers are a good size for Lego parts. I’ve got mostly the 60-drawer units, with a handful of 43-drawer units, which include two medium trays and one large tray in addition to the small ones.
If you live outside of Canada - sorry! - then check into other brands that offer similar products. In the US, Akro-Mils offer several different drawer cabinets that are similar to these and are available from several online retailers.
The last time those cabinets went on sale, I picked up a few extras, which gives me ready-to-expand capabilities (note the empty trays stacked up on top of the left-hand cabinets). Each tray is labeled with a picture of the part, name of the part, and the Lego part number.
Those labels came from The Brick Architect and they’re awesome. They are set up to use Brother brand label printers. Read the article that accompanies those labels to find out more. It’s a little bit of investment, but it was well worth it. I use these labels constantly and when I run across a part that doesn’t already have a label, it’s not difficult to make a custom label using Brother’s software.
Some parts are too large to be stored in those little drawers. For these pieces, I use plastic bins. I like the clear ones, which make it easy to see what parts are inside without having to open the container. These are labeled as well, although I used 24mm label tape for these to make them easier to see.
The containers are KIS brand 2.1 Litre Omnibox. They’re available in several stores around Canada, but the best deal I’ve found on them is at Dollarama, where they are packaged in a 3-pack for $3, which is cheaper than ONE of the same bins at other stores. If your local Dollarama is sold out of them, you can buy them by the case from the Dollarama website. Fair warning, though… case shipments usually have one or more broken lids. They’ll credit you back for the broken ones, but they won’t send you replacement lids. It’s best if you can find them in the store.
I can’t say enough good things about these containers. They’re a really good size for Lego, they stack easily, you can remove the lid easily, but it snaps on securely enough that you don’t need to worry if you drop one. Or even a stack of them.
This was moving day, when the collection moved into the East Wing. Shortly after this pic was taken, I moved the cart too fast and the back stack of boxes fell over and hit the floor on their sides. That’s 18 small bins and four large ones. Roughly 15,000 little parts total.
Not one of the boxes came open. None of the pieces fell out. That was the point when I decided that I would absolutely stick with this brand!
To organize the stacks of bins, I got some resin shelving units which have enough space between shelves for a triple-stack of KIS bins, five across, front and back, for a total of 30 bins per shelf. They work really well.
Each shelf face holds a different kind of piece - in other words, if you’re standing in front of a shelving unit, the bins that face you are of a category or two. This makes it easy to find things - instead of searching every shelf for (say) a sloped piece of a particular kind, I can go right to the shelf that has all the sloped pieces, which makes the hunt much quicker. Also, those bins with the sloped pieces are arranged in order of angle, so the 45 degree sloped pieces will be between the 33 degree slopes and the 57 degree slopes.
Likewise, if I need (say) a 1x3 plate, I’d go to the shelf with the 1x plates and the 1x3s are between the 1x2s and the 1x4s. The clear bins make it easy to see which one holds the colour I want.
In the same manner, the drawer cabinets hold categories of parts. Round 1x1 ‘button’ plates and tiles in this one, clips and hinges in that one, maybe wheels and tires in another, minifig accessories in another, etc.
This is the system that has worked well for me. Sorted by part type first, then subdivided down to smaller categories as needed, all the way down to individual colours, and the containers are arranged in a logical fashion based on the category of parts they hold.
Live and learn!
It took a lot of time and some trial-and-error before I came upon the best system for me. It wasn’t uncommon to tweak the arrangement from time to time until I got what worked the best. Occasionally, it even meant completely overhauling the organization system and starting again.
Also, I tried a lot of different kinds of containers before I settled on the KIS brand ones. I started out with food storage containers, but they took up too much space, they didn’t stack well, and the lids were harder to get on and off - which led to me leaving the lids off while I worked on a project and that led to a few spills, which led to bad words.
In order to save some space (or so I thought), I transferred some parts from the food containers into tackle boxes. It seemed to be a good idea at the time.
They were awful. I couldn’t wait to save up enough money to get those drawer cabinets and rid myself of the tackle boxes! Yes, it’s true that you can separate parts easily in them - but getting those parts out, especially if you need to find a particular colour, can be quite difficult. You can end up having spillage from one compartment to the ones adjacent to it, then you spend even more time trying to get everything back in its place. Also, because the lids open and expose all the compartments at once, if you drop one of these things, well… bad language happens.
The last thing these got used for were minifig accessories, which worked fairly well. Those aren’t pieces you usually need a lot of and so digging one out of the little compartment wasn’t too bad.
I hope you’ve gotten some ideas for your own collection that you can use. I find that sorting and cataloging can be calming and almost therapeutic at times, and having a well-organized system to sort everything into goes a long way toward that goal. So set up your space, work out a system that works for you, put on some nice music or perhaps a favourite movie in the background, and make your own order out of chaos.