Storage and Sorting LEGO

[mokka]

Dear All,

My LEGO storage solution is built with 2 racks from the old IKEA EXPEDIT series.
The new KALLAX series with the same compartment size would work as well.

Each shelf has 4 x 4 compartments, which are further divided in 2 or 3 drawers.
Strips of particle wood set the height for the lower shelves and serve as guides for the cardboard trays.

The trays are filled with cans and boxes of various sizes.
Thanks to my volunteers the supply does not end (-:

The sharp edge is removed with a can opener. Any remaining burrs are smoothed using the steel rod with rounded tip.
This facilitates filling and emptying the cans and minimizes the risk of cutting my fingers.

Each tray contains parts of one size or type.

Depending on their quantity and size, the parts within one tray can be further sorted by color.
Frequently used parts are put on the front end of the drawers.
Drawers with frequently used part types or sizes are preferrably put at levels which are easy to reach.

Following these basic rules, my sorting scheme has developed as follows:
Bricks, plates and tiles are placed by type / width in rows and by length in columns.

The left bottom drawers contain miscellaneous stuff and overflow, sorted out from bulk orders.

This sorting system is working well for me:
- big storage capacity (well more than 100 k of parts), because the full 40 cm depth of the shelf is used
- high versatility thanks to variable arrangement of the trays and use of cans with various sizes
- easy access - single cans or complete trays can be taken to the building table
- the cats are well-fed and happy (-:

Greetings, Justus

Edited March 25 by mokka

[GameyRaccoon]

On 2/3/2022 at 4:30 PM, mrklaw said:

 

Depends how many bricks you have. Only a few? By colour works. More than 10k? I’d suggest by category (eg all 1x bricks, all 2x bricks etc), and do some separation in each category (eg separate out 1 and 2 stud length from the longer ones or they’ll get lost among the larger pieces). 

https://brickarchitect.com/guide/bricks/large/

this person has great ways to handle different sized collections, and a handy guide to categories you can use as a starting point (but be flexible and merge/split as you need based on how many drawers/space you have)

 

I display my lego in Ikea Billy bookcases with glass Morlinen doors on, to help protect a little from dust. a mix of 30cm and 40cm deep depending on what space I have. 

How about closer to 100k? All in all I have well over 125,000 pieces in my collection (With maybe half that taken up by sets on display). Would you recommend sorting by color and  shape at that point? (i.e., one drawer with light bley clips, one drawer with light bley 1x? tiles, one drawer with light bley 1x? plates, etc.) Right now it's all sorted by color in ziplock bags. Hoping to sort it out properly soon.

[Yoggington]

21 hours ago, GameyRaccoon said:

How about closer to 100k? All in all I have well over 125,000 pieces in my collection (With maybe half that taken up by sets on display). Would you recommend sorting by color and  shape at that point? (i.e., one drawer with light bley clips, one drawer with light bley 1x? tiles, one drawer with light bley 1x? plates, etc.) Right now it's all sorted by color in ziplock bags. Hoping to sort it out properly soon.

Yep, that's how I'd go about it.

Maybe not down to the level of every single part and colour of part needs to be separate, as different volumes dictate different tactics. For me I've some drawers mixed like;

1) Very low volume of a part - doesn't matter the colour, all in one drawer

2) Medium volume of a part - Split to one drawer with monochrome (Black, white, greys) and another drawer with all other colours.

3) High volume of part - each drawer contains a colour or range of colours (like I've a drawer full of grey 1x2 bricks, and another that has all the different greens of 1x2s)

4) Rarely/occasionally - I'll mix a part similarly where each variant is super low count. All "food" type utensils for example, go in the one drawer in the utensils box. A carrot is as good as a pie here for functionality & finding.

 

[GameyRaccoon]

1 hour ago, Yoggington said:

Yep, that's how I'd go about it.

Maybe not down to the level of every single part and colour of part needs to be separate, as different volumes dictate different tactics. For me I've some drawers mixed like;

1) Very low volume of a part - doesn't matter the colour, all in one drawer

2) Medium volume of a part - Split to one drawer with monochrome (Black, white, greys) and another drawer with all other colours.

3) High volume of part - each drawer contains a colour or range of colours (like I've a drawer full of grey 1x2 bricks, and another that has all the different greens of 1x2s)

4) Rarely/occasionally - I'll mix a part similarly where each variant is super low count. All "food" type utensils for example, go in the one drawer in the utensils box. A carrot is as good as a pie here for functionality & finding.

 

How many Akro-Mills style cabinets do you think I'd need? For the foreseeable future I'm very limited in space. (Plus I'm renting, so no mounting anything to the walls.) Currently I have two cabinets and it's nowhere near enough. Do you think it's worth getting to a total of six cabinets (three stacks of two) for everything small and putting larger pieces in some kind of scrapbook drawer? Is six too many and I could do fine with three? 

If you've gone with a similar solution yourself, do you know ~ how many elements you can fit per cabinet?

[bonox]

On 4/13/2026 at 11:01 AM, GameyRaccoon said:

How about closer to 100k? All in all I have well over 125,000 pieces in my collection (With maybe half that taken up by sets on display). Would you recommend sorting by color and  shape at that point? (i.e., one drawer with light bley clips, one drawer with light bley 1x? tiles, one drawer with light bley 1x? plates, etc.) Right now it's all sorted by color in ziplock bags. Hoping to sort it out properly soon.

how about close to 1000k

My million free parts (not built into something yet) are in two major sets - building and replenishment. The building set is the nicely laid out containers by type, generally with mixed colour, probably a couple dozen to many dozens of each colour part in each type. When things run low I go to the replenishment buckets, which are just that - big storage boxes full of bags containing thousands of each part type/colour and top up the building ones. Stuff I use regularly gets more building compartments. Stuff I don't use much gets combined with o ther stuff to save a bit of space. in the replenishment bins, everything is sorted into type and sometimes colour, but mostly just part type of all colours with the rare/expensive stuff in a small bag inside the bigger bag. A big build will start out with the replenishment bins to get most of what I want, then go back to the build containers to build and finish.

The building sets are on and around my desk. The replenishment bins are in the attic/shed etc.

6 hours ago, GameyRaccoon said:

How many Akro-Mills style cabinets do you think I'd need? ...

If you've gone with a similar solution yourself, do you know ~ how many elements you can fit per cabinet?

as above - don't necessarily try to store your entire collection in one place if you don't need to. This bit is defintely your individual style and thinking about how much stuff you ahve and how much you actually need access to immediately vs 'could go hunting in other places but would take longer'

 

The main reason i do this is because sorted stuff in drawers/pack and stack containers/dog food tins etc take up far more space than packing zip lock bags into storage boxes. If I had a massive warehouse to build in I'd just put everything in the one place, but I have a small place, so I split the collection into what I probably want right now and the bulk of the stuff I might want later.

Edited April 14 by bonox

[Yoggington]

20 hours ago, GameyRaccoon said:

How many Akro-Mills style cabinets do you think I'd need? For the foreseeable future I'm very limited in space. (Plus I'm renting, so no mounting anything to the walls.) Currently I have two cabinets and it's nowhere near enough. Do you think it's worth getting to a total of six cabinets (three stacks of two) for everything small and putting larger pieces in some kind of scrapbook drawer? Is six too many and I could do fine with three? 

If you've gone with a similar solution yourself, do you know ~ how many elements you can fit per cabinet?

I'm afraid I have no idea what my item count is near, so I can't translate that to how many cabinets, sorry.

[GameyRaccoon]

3 minutes ago, Yoggington said:

I'm afraid I have no idea what my item count is near, so I can't translate that to how many cabinets, sorry.

Don't worry about it mate. Thanks for the help. :)

14 hours ago, bonox said:

don't necessarily try to store your entire collection in one place if you don't need to. This bit is defintely your individual style and thinking about how much stuff you ahve and how much you actually need access to

Makes perfect sense in your case. I won't have a million loose pieces for a very long time, so I think I'm definitely a ways away from needing a solution like yours. 

[mokka]

@GameyRaccoon,

I sort by part or type first.
Large quantities of parts are then sorted by color or color group second.

I prefer to store everything in one place, thus bags and boxes with overflow are included.
My storage solution with two racks holds about 100 k of parts at present, with quite some space left.
The racks can stand without wall mount.

The shelves and trays are more than 1 foot deep, which provides much more volume than the small drawer boxes.
Therefore, I think that even just 1 rack could hold 100 k.

Greetings, Justus

 

 

Edited April 15 by mokka

[hikouki]

How much time does the average AFOL spend organizing Lego bricks into these organizers. I feel like I need a whole week to do that.

[bonox]

4 hours ago, hikouki said:

How much time does the average AFOL spend organizing Lego bricks into these organizers. I feel like I need a whole week to do that.

lots and lots. But:

 

1. it's therapeutic and

2. You only have to do it once. Searching for a repeating  part in a box of assorted stuff means you do it again and again and again for however many of those parts you may want in the build. 

Some people like that searching behaviour, for others who know exectly the part they want, it's a nightmare and makes a build take forever. When you take something apart - again, sort once back into the individual part types, then you're good to go again.

On 4/15/2026 at 7:15 AM, GameyRaccoon said:

Makes perfect sense in your case. I won't have a million loose pieces for a very long time, so I think I'm definitely a ways away from needing a solution like yours. 

it's just a thought - and despite having a literal tonne of parts, i've probably got less than 40 or 50 thousand in ready use, nicely accessible drawers and boxes at any one time. In my mind, it's about what you're likely to use (or know you want to use if you'r'e building from a plan), not how much of everything you own you can see at once. That probably wouldn't change even with just 1% of the parts I actually have.

Edited Wednesday at 07:20 AM by bonox

[BKu]

Putting everything in a drawer is one thing, but finding it back is another thing. I have around 72.000 parts in 382 drawers. (see in an earlier post how I did this).
To find back my parts have done two things:
1. Put on every drawer a label with a small picture of the part which in it.
2. Use Brickstore database program to make an inventory of everything you have.

Brickstore is a great help, it's abit (well, better say a lot) of work to count everything you have (I did it during the Covid Lockdown period), but then it's such a great help to find back your parts in the drawers, to see how much parts you have of each partnumber.
 

[hikouki]

18 hours ago, bonox said:

lots and lots. But:

 

1. it's therapeutic and

2. You only have to do it once. Searching for a repeating  part in a box of assorted stuff means you do it again and again and again for however many of those parts you may want in the build. 

Some people like that searching behaviour, for others who know exectly the part they want, it's a nightmare and makes a build take forever. When you take something apart - again, sort once back into the individual part types, then you're good to go again.

it's just a thought - and despite having a literal tonne of parts, i've probably got less than 40 or 50 thousand in ready use, nicely accessible drawers and boxes at any one time. In my mind, it's about what you're likely to use (or know you want to use if you'r'e building from a plan), not how much of everything you own you can see at once. That probably wouldn't change even with just 1% of the parts I actually have.

 

16 hours ago, BKu said:

Putting everything in a drawer is one thing, but finding it back is another thing. I have around 72.000 parts in 382 drawers. (see in an earlier post how I did this).
To find back my parts have done two things:
1. Put on every drawer a label with a small picture of the part which in it.
2. Use Brickstore database program to make an inventory of everything you have.

Brickstore is a great help, it's abit (well, better say a lot) of work to count everything you have (I did it during the Covid Lockdown period), but then it's such a great help to find back your parts in the drawers, to see how much parts you have of each partnumber.
 

 

I think I might just hire someone to do it for me. 

[Yoggington]

On 4/22/2026 at 8:16 AM, bonox said:

2. You only have to do it once.

I'm clearly doing something wrong so 

[Stereo]

When I add new categories I sort it as I look for pieces for something.  Like recently I split up my 1x2 modified tiles into subtypes, because I was looking for white 1x2 curved slope with left+right corner wedges.  So now I have 1x2 tile with textured top (grilles, slope grilles, ingots) and 1x2 with curved top.  Probably get through 60% of the sorting before even finding the pieces I wanted.

In general I keep my pieces in a few places, plates+tiles in one stack of drawers, modified bricks+other in another, Technic in a third, basic bricks in a fourth.  So when I'm dealing with unsorted Lego due to buying new stuff or taking a build apart, I split it into those categories and then deal with each over time.  The basic bricks don't come up a lot in most builds, so I sometimes go through multiple builds before putting them away, and store them in less accessible bins.  If I do need a bunch of them I can grab the whole bin and put it in front of the stacks of drawers.

Edited Thursday at 02:35 PM by Stereo

[aFrInaTi0n]

1 hour ago, Yoggington said:

I'm clearly doing something wrong so 

Same here  -  found it a good rule of thumb to have a singular box where things to be decomposed are wandering in - if that has filled or I know some parts are in I have not in any drawers, then it may be a meditating break to do a sorting session to fill up the drawers again :D

I am happy I am having mostly technic parts, not much of the tiny regular system bricks for the stuff I am interested in, otherwise I would tend to get insane more easily by the amount of different parts and colors there..