7 Reasons We Love Plastic Storage Drawers for Legos

Over the last year or two, Haley has become a real “Lego Maniac.” She has always loved playing with building toys – and Lego is no exception.

She especially loves the “girl Legos” – the Disney Princess & Friends sets are favorites. She has so much fun building the sets, spends hours playing with them, and then eventually winds up taking them apart to use the pieces in her own “imagination builds” (her words, not mine).

Some of Haley's current favorite Lego sets/builds.
Some current favorites!

Haley even picked Lego Friends as the theme for her recent birthday party – check out the cake & birthday banner we made! (And, of course, she got a few new sets to build as gifts!)

As her Lego collection has grown, though, we noticed it was becoming more difficult for her to play with since it was harder to find specific pieces in her (much fuller) Lego bin. This meant a few things:

  • The overflowing bin of Legos got dumped out regularly so she could comb through all of the pieces more easily. Inevitably it needed to be picked up at bedtime – and it was difficult to find all those tiny pieces on the shag rug in her bedroom.
  • When she did find her favorite pieces/mini-figs, she would put them in a separate container so she’d know where they were the next time she wanted them – which meant we had containers of “special Legos” all over.
  • She just wouldn’t play with them as much because it was too hard to find things and too much work to pick up.
Using muffin tins & small bowls to sort out Lego pieces for a new set.
Muffin tins work great for sorting out the pieces of a new set!

The chaos of the whole situation was driving me a little nuts, so I decided to fix it. I added to her collection of plastic drawers and made a spot in the corner of the sunroom where her entire Lego collection can live and she can build to her heart’s content. (She had 3 of these small 5-drawer units; for this project, we added 3 of these larger 3-drawer units.)

Plastic Storage Drawers for Legos

7 Reasons Plastic Storage Drawers Work For Us:

I know there are lots of different ways to store & organize Legos, so, let me tell you why this set-up has been a game-changer for us:

  1. There is a drawer for each color family of bricks (we combined similar colors in a few cases – multiple shades of purple go together, for example), so she doesn’t have to ever search through a huge amount of Legos looking for that one piece she needs.

  2. The drawers are sized well to the quantity of each color that she has – we made sure not to pack any of the drawers too full and there’s still plenty of room in all of them to “paw” through the pieces to find a specific one without needing to dump anything out on the floor.

  3. The drawers come out of the unit. When she’s building something larger, she can take out the drawers for all of the colors she wants to use and spread out on the floor with all of them (still no need to dump and clean-up is quick!)
  4. We have extra drawers for minifigs, transparent pieces, instruction books, and all the small things she has built and is still playing with. This means she has designated spots for all of the parts that are currently important to her and they don’t need to be stored in a separate container apart from the others.

  5. We have a spot for storing larger “builds” on a shelving unit nearby. (Although not technically a reason to love the drawers themselves, I had to include this because the placement of the drawers near the shelves has been such a good combination for us.) The shelves are big enough that she doesn’t have to take things apart to put them away and I don’t have to walk & vacuum around all kinds of in-process Lego creations. It’s a win-win.

  6. There’s room for expansion – as her collection continues to grow, we can add more (or bigger) drawer units to accommodate the additional pieces without having to start all over.
  7. It makes sense to her and she is able to play independently. For the most part, she’s able to build without too many requests for help finding a specific piece that’s gone missing.

I know this set-up likely wouldn’t work for every Lego fan (and may not work for us forever), but for us right now, it working out fabulously!

Storage Drawers for Legos & a Shelf for storing finished creations.
Haley's Lego Building Corner
Haley’s Lego Building Corner :)

How do you store/organize Legos? Anything you’ve tried that’s worked well for your “Lego Maniac”?

Filed Under: Cleaning and Organizing

Tags:

Leave a Reply