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How we fixed our Lego storage problem

I had known we had a Lego storage problem for some years, but it wasn't until I took this photo that I realised (a) how bad it was, and (b) what we had to do to fix it.

For about two years, we used these huge red boxes to keep it all in. They were good in the sense that we could get all the Lego in them, but they were also terrible because we couldn't find anything.

Building something - anything, whether it was an official set from the official instructions, or something original from our imaginations - took hours, because we could never find the pieces we wanted.

So we'd hunt for them. Bent over this massive pile of Lego on the floor, scraping and scraping and peering and poking. It was horrible. It was uncomfortable. It did awful things to my knees.

It wasn't just uncomfortable and hard work and ugly, it was also taking the fun out of Lego.

As soon as I noticed that, I decided: we have to Fix The Lego Problem.

We had to sort the Lego so that it would always be easy to find the bits you wanted.

But how should we sort it?

A few years ago, we tried sorting it by colour. This was a disaster. Look down into a plastic bag full of black Lego and it's like looking into deep space. You can't see anything useful, just endless black. You still can't find the piece you want.

Back in 2009, I wrote A common nomenclature for Lego families, an only-partly-serious article for The Morning News about the words different families use to refer to different Lego pieces. "Pass me that four-er," we say in our house - and we all know exactly which piece the speaker is asking for.

I realised that the way to Fix The Lego Problem was to create a storage system that works the same way. When your brain says you need a four-er (or whatever your family calls it), you can reach out to the thing you keep the four-ers in, and grab the one you want.

So that's what we did. We sorted the Lego by shape or common theme.

So we had all the 2x4 blocks together. All the 2x2 blocks together. All the wheels in one place. All the "slopey bits" in one place. All the wings in one place.

Here's how we made it happen.

• We tipped the contents of the huge red boxes all over the floor, and began to sort by shape. We started at 8.30am on a Saturday morning.
• We spent hours doing this. My knees were killing me.

• At about 3pm, we had about 25 different piles of different sizes. We hadn't finished the sorting phase, but we were near enough the end to see what we needed. So we stopped, stretched our aching legs, and went to the DIY store.
• We bought two of each of these:

• We came home, and put all the piles into different drawers. It felt amazing.
• We continued the sorting and putting until about 9pm. We still hadn't finished, but we only had one small carrier bag of unsorted Lego.
• We tried an experiment. "Find me a green four-er," I said. Barney found one in 2 seconds. "Find me a large wheel." Yep. "Find a flat 2x12 piece." No problem. It worked!. The system worked.
• We went to bed, because we were knackered.

The next day, Barney got up early and went downstairs to build. He started on some old Mars Mission sets, and built one in almost no time. It was like having it new, all over again. He was so happy. So was I. Despite the pain in my knees.

Filed under: life
(3rd July 2014)

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