Lego: organising and storing

Everyone knows that unexpectedly standing on Lego hurts. It's therefore a massive pain in the arse that the stuff resists organising. No matter how much space you devote to it, it still ends up overflowing onto the floor and rattling up the vacuum cleaner. Despite knowing that I was fighting a losing battle I spent the week or so after Christmas sorting and organising Adam and Jack's Lego collection. I haven't bothered before now because it was only Adam collecting it, but when they got five Lego sets between them for Christmas this year I knew I would have to do something about it.

I really wish I had taken photos of how it looked before, but I don't have a great capacity for public humiliation so it's probably a good thing I don't. They had two of these boxes from Ikea full to the brim, which obviously meant that the pieces kept falling out through the handle holes, and a slightly smaller plastic box also full. Their instruction books were stuffed in another box and getting ripped and lost, it was just a giant mess.

The first thing I did was to sort the bricks, mostly by colour. I put all the red bricks in one box, green in another, blue in another.

That was when I realised that I didn't have enough boxes for every category that I wanted. I ended up mixing black and white, yellow and orange, and dark and light grey.

Photography skillz: I has none.

I still didn't have enough boxes. Dammit. I ended up putting the rest of the bricks into separate plastic bags in the top of the boxes as a temporary solution.

In case you're wondering how long it took me (us actually, Andy and Adam helped. Jack mostly got in the way) to sort all this, we did seven hours the first two days and three hours on the third day. Yes, 17 hours of nothing but sorting Lego bricks. It's a good thing I don't care what my nails look like at the moment. (A word of advice on the nails thing. If you're going to do this, wait until after you've finished sorting to trim your nails. I did it after the first day and couldn't separate any bricks afterwards.)

It took about a day to realise that the plastic bags would have to be a very temporary solution when the bag with the pink and purple bricks leaked into the red box. I decided that I'd have to use bags because we simply don't have the space for any more furniture in their bedroom, so I figured I'd make some drawstring bags. People who actually know me in real life may be laughing their asses off right now because I don't do sewing. Seriously, I don't think I've ever even sewn on a button before (shut up, I know that's pathetic.) So, after yet another trip to Ikea (I think 95% of our stuff comes from there) to get a sewing machine and some fabric, and a quick read through of these sewing tips for beginners I started to make my bags.

The first thing I learned was to sew the channel for the drawstring before sewing the sides together. Once I got the hang of it they really didn't take very long. Of course they're not perfect but I'm pretty pleased with them.

I said they weren't perfect. At least this goes on the inside.

Ignore the dingy carpet. Please. It's gross.

Andy very kindly did the drawing on the bags to show which bricks are inside.

The last thing to do was organise the instruction books, which I did by putting them in plastic pockets in large ring binders.

So my floors are now Lego free and I can walk around barefoot again. I'll let you know how long it lasts.