Organization: legos and playroom

If you know my boys, you know that they love Legos.  They will play with Legos for hours and hours.  And they have successfully strewn approximately 52,774 Legos throughout my house.  I often think to myself as I vacuum their rooms and the PlayRoom, "I just vacuumed up $43 in Legos."  Legos are a mess.  That was before the baby.  Now add a precocious 15 month old to the mix and the mess just got really messy. 

Last year when my friend Ang told me that she sorted all of her son's Legos by color, I thought she was nuts, as it turns out she's a genius.  I did delve into the sorting last year.  I took all of the Lego Minifigs out of the general population and put them in their own container.  This was no small task since Keith enjoys removing every removable piece of Lego guy possible (and some non-removable pieces too), tiny hands, guns, hair, etc.

All that to say, I conquered the Legos and their wicked step-brothers Coloring Chaos. 

This is only the tip of the crayon, paper, marker, etc iceberg.  And this is the tidy version.

Legos live here..... And 75 other places.

Going into this project I was pretty sure that I was going to have to purchase some kind of storage container.  I was initially considering the 5 gallon Home Depot bucket with the tool organizer for the coloring supplies.  But that's still $10 and I would probably need at least 2.  I also was thinking that I needed to buy more storage drawers.  That's when I realized that I have two additional sets of storage drawers that are currently being (ineffectively) used for coloring supplies.  So I dumped all of the coloring in one place and started sorting Legos by color.

The stacker/sorter thing to the left sorts Legos by size.  I used this to get my tiny pieces sorted and find all of the MiniFig parts.

Once I was done sorting I checked the inventory and was happy that I had enough room!  We have lots of Star Wars, so the biggest drawers are a Black/White/Gray and a Green/Brown.  I also have the teeny tiny pieces that my boys love playing with in two drawers, instructions and vehicles in seperate drawers.  The rest of the colors Red, Yellow/Orange, Blue and Pink/Purple all got small drawers.  The final drawer is a bigger drawer for Legos that "need to be sorted."

Red, Yellow/Orange, Blue, Pink/Purple, To Be Sorted

Instructions, Vehicles, Tiny Pieces (2), Green/Brown, Black/White/Gray

Next up: Coloring supplies.

After sorting Legos I realized that the Lego sorting boxes were perfect for crayons, markers, etc.  So I went through several bags and boxes of writing and coloring utensils.  I checked every pen and marker, tossed lame non-Crayola crayons, set broken crayons aside for crafting and sorted by type.  That included sorting the skinny crayons from the chunky crayons.

There it is!  I threw away the magazines in the magazine holders and put coloring books in one and workbooks in the other.

Then I found all of the wayward flashcards and put them in the former Minifig container.  Loose worksheets, math facts, hand-writing practice pages, and speech homework pages are in the white binder.  Clipboards, spiral notebooks are up there too. 

It took me all week.  Mostly because I had a little helper: Little Miss Can't Be Sleeping.  But it is so nice to be able to tidy the room quickly.  And to see the boys play with Legos that they didn't even know they had!  Total Cost $0