Storage and Sorting LEGO

[Venefic]

I just came back from Germany where I took advantage of the Pick a Brick stores in Munich. I bought 7 cups (sounds like a lot but I did this because where I live there are no LEGO Official Stores) so now I need all my homeless bricks some company. It's a shame that the LEGOLAND there is closed in Germany. I would have loved to see the extra big 'pick a brick' style store. 

[koalayummies]

I have begun my journey to further sort and store. 

From a combination of large bins and partially sorted boxes:

Beginning the process:

About 1/8th complete:

Speculating now that there will still be some box or bin usage even when all done. 

Edited February 18, 2018 by koalayummies

[murtaughf3]

On 2/18/2018 at 5:35 PM, koalayummies said:

I have begun my journey to further sort and store. 

From a combination of large bins and partially sorted boxes:

Beginning the process:

About 1/8th complete:

Speculating now that there will still be some box or bin usage even when all done. 

Are those the akro mills drawers? I see several people have issue when ordering the stack on ones and them arriving broken, just wondering if the akro mills would be any better. 

[koalayummies]

14 hours ago, murtaughf3 said:

Are those the akro mills drawers? I see several people have issue when ordering the stack on ones and them arriving broken, just wondering if the akro mills would be any better. 

Yes Akro Mils. No issues, arrived in their own perfect-fit box with no damage.

[murtaughf3]

6 hours ago, koalayummies said:

Yes Akro Mils. No issues, arrived in their own perfect-fit box with no damage.

Awesome thank you. 

 

[Dorino]

Here's my current "setup". I started using wardrobe hoping that doors would keep dust away. They do, but not as much as i expected.

I have 6 drawer boxes from Aldi and few container boxes for minifigs / technic pieces.

At this time my wardrobe works both as a display and building place. Limitation of space keeps me away from buying bigger sets i guess. Couldn't resist £104 UCS Slave I

According to Rebrickable i have 20,000 pieces. I think i am doing well with keeping them in one place.
 

 

[nicman]

^Same, I currently keep most of mine in my wardrobe for the summer. Over 14 years, I have collected a huge amount of lego.

Edited June 29, 2018 by nicman

[Black_Belt_Titan]

My loose part storage solution is different sized plastic bags. Smaller bags for individual piece types, medium bags for grouping small bags with similar pieces, and large bags for a couple medium bags. Currently I have pieces in 7 different large bags in one of my spare dresser drawers.

[fred67]

I originally posted this on reddit while taking a break from EB (don't know why, and now I really don't like reddit/r/lego much anymore).

============================================

I mentioned a while back that I was going to write this, and was recently reminded about it the other day. I'm not done cleaning up and putting everything away, but figured now was as good a time as any because, let's face it, I'll never be completely done.

Confessions of an Obsessive Sorter: what I did wrong, and what I do now.

tl;dr link to the album to show how I have things sorted now: https://imgur.com/a/maz3fBz

Life isn’t perfect:

A lot of us have seen, with eyes green with envy, pictures of people who have these wonderful LEGO rooms with tons of space and walls of perfectly organized LEGO parts. This is not one of those stories.

My house is terrible, and I could write a book about what’s wrong with it, but I still feel fortunate that I have the luxury of having a bonus room. My wife and I have shifted things around the house; while we had a guest room, our bonus room was: my office, her office, our TV watching area, and my “LEGO room.” It’s a pretty good size room, but it’s not THAT big, so no big LEGO city layout for me.

So how to organize all that LEGO? Like a lot of people, I started off small. I got little Sterilite drawers when my collection outgrew the LEGO tub (my first purchase as an adult). I started collecting a lot of large sets with no place to actually display them. I bought Sterilite drawer systems, I used “banker” boxes (those cardboard filing boxes) to store partially disassembled sets when I wasn’t using them.

My loose LEGO collection was a hodgepodge of various storage solutions. Sterilite drawers, a single “Stack-On” organizer, a couple of Akro-Mils organizers, various hobby/bead type organizers I got from places like Michael’s, JoAnn’s, and Walmart. Then I found the Stanley organizer.

https://imgur.com/avOIoSW

They seemed perfect - a lot of little various sized bins you could take out and dump if necessary, so I bought a couple of them and started putting a few pieces in there. I always liked Akro-Mils, but who’s got all that wall space I’d need to put my whole collection there, all sorted perfectly? The bug hit me - using these Stanley organizers, I could sort everything by part AND color! And because I could put them sideways on inexpensive storage shelves, like books in a bookcase, the storage density would be very high, and I could sort everything!

I ended up with 15 of the smaller units - the ones with 25 bins, and 13 of the larger, deeper units, each with 10 bins. My bright idea was that each color could have an organizer, and each part would get it’s own bin! It didn’t take long before reality smacked me in the face - there are just too many different parts. Each color ended up with two organizers; one small and one large. But it still wasn’t enough. I even added extra organizers for certain colors, but it still wasn’t enough. Enter the baggie.

Ok, so I had a lot of black 1x2 plates, but only a couple 1x1, so I’d put them in a little baggie to keep them sorted, and stuff it in the bin with the 1x2 plates. Oh… I also had a couple of 1x3, so I’d do the same thing.

Before long I was averaging 1 extra baggie per bin. Sure, some had none, but others had two or three or more! Particularly the large bins. So I had slopes, but not enough of any one to make getting it’s own bin worthwhile, so I’d have one bin with five or six different types of slopes, all in their own baggies.

I’m going to jump ahead in the story and give you this picture: this image is roughly half the baggies I ended up with after unsorting. Sorry I have no “before” pictures; sharing the story with you wasn’t on my mind when I started my re-sort.

https://imgur.com/4h8eUZK

So, imagine how proud I was after weeks of anal-retentively sorting every part and color into its own “thing” (be it a bin or a baggie). Of course, I still wasn’t completely sorted… unless you’re running a business and actually have all that space, I think it’s pretty impossible.

But there I was: a shelf unit full of Stanley organizers, each with its own color. Now I knew exactly where each part was, right! Wrong! You see, I put the parts I had few of into the small organizers, and the parts I had more of into the large organizers. So now black 2x4 bricks were in the large black organizer, but blue 2x4 bricks were in the small one. So I’d have to pull all the color containers and look in them to see which one had that part I was looking for. Sometimes large slopes were too much for the small organizers, but the cheese slopes worked well in the small one.

To make matters worse, there’s more than one red color; there’s more than one blue, more than one green, yellow, orange, and gray. All the “special” colors had to be kept out and in other organizers - I didn’t have enough of any of those parts to fully utilize its own organizer.

Then what happened? After I proudly organized my whole collection, I celebrated by building a modular building. At the end, I had a handful of small leftover parts. It took me a half an hour to put them all away. Even when I knew exactly where it went, I had to pull the organizer off the shelf and open it, find the little baggie that the part went in, open it, put the part away, seal up the bag, close the organizer and put it away.

I knew instantly I screwed up, but I had no idea what to do about it. The terrible thing is that if you’d asked me how to sort, I would have given you the tried and true answer that I’ve given since my first sorting, and that is echoed by most people with experience, and I didn’t follow my own advice. I didn’t have the heart to completely redo everything; I didn’t have the wall space to not have to use the higher density storage of the Stanley organizers, and I knew there was still a lot of value in the Stanley organizers. I’d been stuck this way for years, dreading putting little bits away, spending ages getting parts together for MOCs.

The subjectively best way to sort: by part, then by color.

Simply put, your collection grows organically. I might have a lot of part A, you might have a lot of part B, so we won’t sort exactly the same way. When you start collecting, and have that bin of LEGO you decide is too much to wade through to find what you want, you want to sort some stuff out.

The first rule of sorting is that the goal is to make it easy and quick to find the part you want. What’s the point otherwise?

The second rule of sorting is there are no other rules.

First of all, if you’re like most people, you have begun to accumulate a lot of smaller parts. The best first step is then to pull out those smaller parts to separate storage. It could mean just using a sandwich bag, then those parts don’t get lost on the bottom. Now you have fast access to those smaller parts without having to dump the entire bin.

As your collection grows, you have to decide at what point it’s taking you too long to find the part you want. Now, forget the small, not-basic parts (like 1x1 plates with clips and minifigure accessories), and let’s stick with the basics: 1x1 up to 2x8 plates, bricks, and tiles.

Sort by part:

I said it 15 years ago, and I’ve been saying it ever since: it’s easier to find a 2x2 red brick in a bin full of 2x2 bricks than it is to find a red 2x2 brick in a bin full of all red bricks; it’s become a common statement from people making this point.

So your collection is growing, you look and see what part types you have the most of, and you pull those parts out to their own storage. Now your main collection should instantly be a lot easier to look through, but if it’s still not up to your standard, pull the next most common part out to its own storage. Repeat until you’re happy with how quickly you can look through what’s left.

Sort by color:

At some point, though, you may end up with a lot of one kind of part, and it’s getting hard to find the color you want or, more typically, you’ll want 10 of a certain color of that part, and finding one or two is OK, but it’s gotten annoying to find more. That’s when you pull out the most common color of that part into its own storage. Again, until it’s up to your standard, repeat the process… you sort until you can find each part quickly, and don’t over-do it.

Back to the smaller parts, you repeat the same process, but how you do it exactly is up to you. For example, instead of pulling out minifigure guns or hats or head ware from your small parts, you may just pull them all - just pull all the minifigure parts out to separate storage. Then treat those parts the same way - you start to get a lot of minifigure heads that you want more organized, you pull them out to their own storage.

My complete re-sort:

Recently, my wife and I decided to turn the guest bedroom into her office. That gave me a lot of extra space in the bonus room. I’d still need a place for us to watch TV together (we actually have a nicer TV area in the house, but the kids use it), but I was left to my own devices to completely reorganize the room as I wanted.

I started by getting even more inexpensive plastic storage shelves and took over the corner where my wife was. I reoriented the furniture in the room to open up some space and, most importantly, I cleared a large section of wall for Akro-Mils:

https://imgur.com/9YQNYtA

LEGO hit me with an obvious idea:

As I looked at the wall, I knew there still wasn’t enough space for complete sorting. Instead of digging in to those Stanley organizers, I had the fortunate problem of wanting to roll in some of the creator boxes I had into my new storage, so I actually started fresh with them. I had gotten four of the giant creator boxes Walmart has had in the past on Black-Friday. I’d wanted to snag these for a long time, but they were always gone by the time I got there. One year I was fortunate enough to find pallets of them, and picked up four of these 1500 parts boxes. When I started my sort, I opened up the box and found something very interesting: The LEGO Group had sorted the parts into these sets by color groupings, not by specific colors.

You know what? That’s actually good enough. Yes, they didn’t sort by part, which is what I was going to do, but instead of every color needing it’s own spot, I could put color groups of each part into bins. If I needed a blue 2x3, I knew right where to look - and I might see I had more interesting blues than just the standard common one, too - and maybe that would allow me to build more creatively even. In any event, the basic bricks in any color are all findable immediately, without any searching:

https://imgur.com/PKkPDFF

From reds down to grays vertically, from 1x1 to 2x8 horizontally (in order). Any basic part can be found as quickly as any storage solution could possible allow. The only exception was pinks and purples, which I have so few of each of that I put them in one row, but they still follow size convention from left to right.

That’s obviously not enough because you typically find yourself with a LOT of basic bricks. I was going to reuse the Stanley organizers for overflow, but instead I ended up getting a couple of IRIS 10 drawer units. I’ve ordered dividers, but for now they are working out great.

Now if I need a LOT of a basic brick that I have a lot of, I know right where to go.

https://imgur.com/3yHMw8B

Other sections of the wall are all sorted similarly. There’s a section with plates, and one for tiles - they are all arranged likewise, starting in upper left of their area with 1x1 and spreading out to 1x8, 2x and beyond. Plates have the problem of there being so many large sizes. I have an abundance of 4x4 plates, so I have them separated out into the 6qt bins - one each for light and dark gray, and 1 for the rest. Larger than that go into other 6qt bins, when they start getting too large they go to drawers. That’s not the perfect solution, but they are not common to use - the whole idea here is that the more common a part is, the easier it should be to find.

In any event, I still followed the rule - if one color was dominant (particularly if all of one part wouldn’t fit in a single bin), I pulled that color out to its own drawer.

There is a slope section which seems horrendous, but follows a pretty easy pattern - 1x1 cheese that spreads out down and over to larger and larger slopes, then inverse slopes follow the same pattern. Then there are round parts, wall parts, bar parts… these are harder to keep in any kind of perfect order to find exactly what you want quickly, but I know generally where to look and am in the middle of adding labels to drawers.

I still use Stanley organizers:

Despite being more of a pain to get into, these organizes still have a lot of merit. If you look at this picture:

https://imgur.com/6iVTu1e

All the Stanley’s without labels are empty, but the ones with labels include Technic (link above) and trans:

https://imgur.com/ZPyCyBt

And also: vehicle parts (not inclusive - there are some very large vehicle parts that won’t fit), two complete organizers (large and small) just for wheels, and more Technic parts. Also one with various animals and storage (barrels and chests). One key point here is that I have enough that I do not need to have hundreds of little baggies - it’s far easier to find things, and it’s also far easier when building Technic to pull the Technic organizers out and have all the little parts, axles, connectors and so forth right there.

I have another drawer organizer - not Akro-Mils, but ACE Hardware. I reviewed it a while back on Reddit. I’ve decided to use that one for minifigures. All the parts, torsos, legs, heads, armor, weapons, etc..

https://imgur.com/dHUaYbP

The bottom line, A.K.A. The Lesson Learned:

Do NOT over sort. There’s no reason to commit LEGO apartheid when it’s not necessary - it doesn’t make it easier to find parts, and it can lead to making it more difficult, take more time, and be more frustrating when trying to find and put away parts.

Just say “no” to LEGO apartheid:

https://imgur.com/nS74eTH

And just say "no" to excessively organizing by baggies.

Again, the key is to be able to find parts quickly and easily. The most common parts should have the easiest access. Overflow takes slightly more effort. Having the Stanley “suitcase” style organizers allow you to put collections of commonly used parts together, like vehicle parts and Technic.

Now I can put away the extra parts from a modular build in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes.

[Jody Meyer]

Thank you for sharing this, first of all that is an amazing collection. I have become overwhelmed with the amount of sorting that is needed to keep organized, it's to the point that it's leading me back into a dark age without building. I tend to sort by shape and not worry about the colour, I have to many of the one of's.

cheers

Jody

[Coren]

On 7/31/2018 at 9:49 PM, fred67 said:

I originally posted this on reddit while taking a break from EB (don't know why, and now I really don't like reddit/r/lego much anymore).

....

Just say “no” to LEGO apartheid:

https://imgur.com/nS74eTH

...

Your story is a nice story to read through. Although I am no where near the AFOL as any of you (not even MOCcing, this fall and winter though!) I am in the process of sorting parts of LEGO of my son... I have to ask: those labels, where did you get those? They look awesome... I found out (the hard way) that labelling is kind of important and I've made my own labels but they are just plain text.

 

Thanks in advance for your reply!

 

[fred67]

@Coren http://www.brickgun.com/Labels/BrickGun_Storage_Labels.html

There are other labels, but they were designed for a Brother label maker, which I didn't feel like spending something like $70 for.  They are probably better, though.  I just printed these on plain paper and taped them; I also had to hand write a few as they are definitely lacking.

[Jockos]

I don't know, if this question has already been discussed or not, but how would you store unopened (and mostly big) sets? I might have read here or somewhere else that laying down boxes can break the seals or something (?). I'm not thinking about reselling the (upcoming) sets, just don't have the space to display them.

Edited August 7, 2018 by Jockos

[fred67]

I have the luxury of having some bonus room space that I put cheap shelves in.

[Jockos]

Wow, that looks insane!! Thanks for answering!

[TWP]

On 7/31/2018 at 9:49 PM, fred67 said:

 

Interesting story indeed! I luckily didn't make most of the mistakes you did, sorry to hear you got that many trouble with sorting, I can completely imagine that!

Seeing you've got much experience with sorting bricks, I seem to do quite a bit of "apartheid" with my bricks, e.g. every 1x2 and 1x4 has his own drawer space, but these spaces are also almost all completely filled, which seems to be easier and faster when searching with parts. Parting out sets/MOCs and sorting goes a bit slower, but I think it's worth the extra effort, right?

Also, about sorting by colour groups: I don't exactly sort all my bricks like that, I prefer to sort by a group of all compatible colors. When building spaceships, I often use light/dark gray and black, so they are often together, then there's for tree building i sort brown and green in the same place, and for beaches/sea blue and tan works as well. (depending on water technique)

For my basic bricks, I do sort all of one color in one big bin. When i'm building with bricks I use all sizes anyways, no need to further sort them in to specific size for me.

[Andy D]

As @fred67 said " the most important thing is to be able to find parts". With that in mind I have sorted by part type or if not enough parts for a group, a part type group. If I have enough of a specific color I will separate that out as well (finding specific part easily) if I have 50 or 100 of a part in a color, an I have a few in a different color it becomes difficult to find the different color because of moving all those same color part.

My storage system is built on the premise that *if* I have as specific part I know approximately where it might reside. If I have the part it is there, if not, well it is not there... simple huh?

Andy D

 

[Johnny1360]

Loads of great ideas here not much I can add, except sort in such a manner to allow for expansion and further separation of parts as you acquire more pieces. To me that is the most important aspect of any sorting process, so you don't have to continually start over that and do it as cheap as possible repurposing containers as much as possible. 

I also like to keep a small collection of common random parts for quick access, nothing as frustrating as spending all your time recovering parts from hundreds of small containers. 

[Jim]

A sorting system is a living and evolving entity. You start somewhere and you will find out soon enough if it doesn’t work, or simply needs a bit of tweaking. The system will adapt to your needs when your collection grows.

[Boulderer]

We are currently going through the pain of having an extension built at the back of the house.  This has meant that a lot of the Lego has had to go into storage, temporarily.  Unfortunately, a lack of forethought and planning has meant that a lot of the previously sorted pieces have ended up being thrown in together.  I have two months to contemplate a new system before the Lego comes back out of storage.  I think I'll be taking an evening or two to read through this thread again for inspiration.

[TWP]

10 hours ago, Boulderer said:

We are currently going through the pain of having an extension built at the back of the house.  This has meant that a lot of the Lego has had to go into storage, temporarily.  Unfortunately, a lack of forethought and planning has meant that a lot of the previously sorted pieces have ended up being thrown in together.  I have two months to contemplate a new system before the Lego comes back out of storage.  I think I'll be taking an evening or two to read through this thread again for inspiration.

Sounds like a pain having to resort all your pieces, but looking at it from the positive side, maybe you can make it that much more efficient!

 

I've now been re-sorting my entire system since I got new storage drawers, I've been doing this for already a whopping 7 days, still not finished... When the result is in, I'll share some pics!

[Boulderer]

I have to confess to enjoying the process of sorting. I find it relaxing and quite therapeutic.

[Jockos]

Will it cause any harm in the box/parts if I foil wrap the unopened sets for long term? Or it shouldn't be treated that way?

Edited August 21, 2018 by Jockos

[Cylo]

I keep all my loose parts in different boxes sorted according to colour. All my built sets I just put in a big cupboard (with glass doors of course, so you can brag about your collection )

I have some how accumulated over 19700 pieces in the 3 years I really got into lego, so i am running out of storage space lol

2 hours ago, Jockos said:

Will it cause any harm in the box/parts if I foil wrap the unopened sets for long term? Or it shouldn't be treated that way?

I think as long as you don't bang them around or drop them to damage the box and store it in shade, not exposed to the sun and they should stay fine. I have one thats been sitting in the back of my closet for a year and it looked fine when I took it out. It be good to bubble wrap them though

[boogie]

On 8/14/2018 at 12:43 AM, Boulderer said:

I have to confess to enjoying the process of sorting. I find it relaxing and quite therapeutic.

Same for me. If I'm not building, then I am sorting. Either way it counts as Lego time and I enjoy it.