Lego Storage
If you have kids who love to build, you’re probably familiar with the infamous lego storage conundrum. There are so. many. pieces. And so many potential ways to store them. I had a few goals when thinking through my boys’ legos:
Make them Rio-proof (Keep my 2-yr-old from putting them in his mouth or destroying his brother’s creations)
Keep the sets together so Thad (6-yrs-old) can build them over and over #bangforbuck
Make both clean-up AND take-out easy
To address the first issue, I started with this drawer set from The Container Store. My mother-in-law had saved a ton of legos from when my husband was a boy so we have a whole bunch of loose legos. All of those went into these drawers, with one color per drawer. I love that Thad can have several drawers open at once or he can take a full drawer out as he uses it.
To address the second goal, I got these small containers for the Lego sets. We use one container per set and keep both the instructions and lego pieces in the container. You can see in the product picture that they come in sets of three, with a blue divider in the top one. We took those blue dividers out and put them in the drawer set— it just so happened that two blue dividers fit perfectly in the drawers! We used the dividers to separate out the lego heads, legs, torsos, and accessories so that Thad can make his own little men easily. NGL, that’s my favorite part of this whole situation.
Once Thad has built and re-built a set so many times that the instructions are ripped and destroyed, we throw away the instructions and incorporate the lego pieces into the color-coded drawers, which makes room for a new set. I really like that this gives him (and us) a physical boundary so we aren’t continually buying new sets.
As a fun aesthetic bonus, I hung this old printing press drawer above the table (similar) and we keep all of the lego men standing up on the little shelves. To be completely honest, this is not the most practical or efficient storage solution but Thad LOVES it. He is a particular little kid and actually likes organizing and since he is able to maintain it on his own, it works for us.
Last but not least, we have a small basket of in-progress items. This is where Thad puts all of the pieces he is currently working on when I want him to clean up but he isn’t quite finished with his creation. This makes the BIGGEST difference because it would be way too much to expect a 6-yr-old to put away all his legos every time he plays with them but it does allow us to put them out of the way so his room is tidy at the end of the day! And again, it creates a physical boundary so that eventually we will need to sort this bin if it overflows (although that hasn’t happened yet).
And that’s that! This was my way of avoiding those lego men storage containers which, imo, are WAY too specialized. I love that we will be able to re-use these storage containers once my boys are over legos (if that ever happens). By the way, I have a highlight on my Instagram Stories with a little video walk-through, if you’re interested in that! Godspeed to all the other lego mamas out there. ;)
