Lego Storage Idea

This past Christmas, my 5-year-old daughters graduated from duplos to legos, and they have absolutely loved their new lego sets! With all of these new legos, though, comes the inevitable storage issue. After a few months of having them laying around my living room, here's my storage solution!

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First of all yes, I am aware that I am a crazy person, and not everyone wants to sort their legos by color. But let me explain myself. See, along with a wonderfully large set of basic lego blocks in tons of different colors, shapes, and sizes, I got my girls this set for creating a ballet studio and this set for creating a city park (both of which I HIGHLY recommend, by the way), and they also got this book of lego building ideas. The themed sets are great because they come with step-by-step directions for creating every last detail of the set:

I'm sure once the girls are older and get used to the legos, they will do more experimenting and start creating their own things from their imagination, and they are already doing a little bit of that, but they really love the idea of being able to see a picture of something to make and then find out exactly how to create it for themselves, and following along with the directions has been a really great way for them to develop their spatial reasoning (score!).

The problem: any time you're following a specific plan like these, you have to be able to go through and find very specific blocks to create each item. When we had everything dumped into one big bin, that got pretty frustrating! We were spending more time combing through hundreds of blocks looking for one tiny lego in a certain shade of green than we were actually building! Not to mention I was the one doing most of the searching- the girls were getting too frustrated trying to look through all those legos- so they weren't able to work on it independently.

Now that I've attempted to justify my insanity, let me explain my storage solution! :)

It's pretty simple, actually. I found these photo box storage cases on clearance at Michael's and sorted each color into its own case:

The nice thing about this system is that, when the girls decide to make something, they can pull out just the colors they want and look through those boxes to find the blocks they need. It makes it so much easier to find the exact lego they're looking for! And bonus for me: the clean up pretty neatly in those storage cases:

I'm actually thinking about leaving the individual boxes out of the storage cases most of the time. I think when they're put away like that the girls aren't as likely to reach for them on the spur of the moment. But even if I do that, I know I'll be able to use those storage cases for something else, and if we want to tuck them away or take them with us, it's easy to pack them up into the cases!

I know lego storage is a perennial problem, and this is one of those organization challenges that I'm sure I'll be revisiting as our needs change, but for now I'm pretty happy with our solution! What do you do with your legos? Do you attempt to sort them at all or do you dump them all in one spot? Let me know in the comments!

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