Disclosure: this post includes affiliate links to LEGO
It’s no secret that Lydia and Georgie are both huge LEGO fans. On every single birthday or Christmas wish list since they were old enough to press two bricks together, there have been LEGO sets. So it’s not surprising that over the years they have built up quite a collection of bricks and a variety of other weird and wonderful LEGO pieces.
The girls both love to get creative with a mixed pile of LEGO, so once they have built a set and had it on display a while, it gets taken apart and mixed in with their collection. They do occasionally fish out some instructions to rebuild a set, but more often than not they incorporate the different elements into new imaginative builds.
Our solution to storing their ever growing large LEGO collection for the last few years has been a set of Really Useful Drawers. The unique & useful thing about these drawers is they are easily expanded due to their modular design. We’ve picked up a few of their rainbow drawer tower sets and taken them apart to expand our original custom ordered drawer set, allowing us to increase our original storage capacity by more than double.
The towers of drawers are also on wheels which makes them easy to move around when needed. Another great thing about them is that the drawers can be pulled out completely; the girls will often pull out several different drawers onto the floor while they build.
The girls recently switched to sorting their LEGO by colour rather than type, so the drawers that were recently labelled things like bricks, plates, plants are now almost all labelled by colour. They do have a few non colour drawers for minifigs, animals, wheels & doors still, however.
We also have a drawer labelled “Sort me!” which has mixed LEGO in, for quick tidy up sessions – when this drawer gets full, they split it by colour and put it away into the various drawers.
A handful of the drawers that aren’t currently needed for storing the LEGO are labelled “Building in progress”, and the girls use these as deep building trays for any sets they are working on – they work great as they can easily hold a set’s worth of LEGO and the instruction booklets.
The flat tops of the drawer units make a great display area for completed sets and creations. Right now they are displaying the LEGO Friends Heartlake City Amusement Pier set, which also has the LEGO City Ice-Cream Truck visiting.
Large plates and instruction booklets are kept in the closest IKEA storage box in the new Kallax unit next to ‘LEGO corner’, and we also have some BRIK wall tiles next to the drawers to build on.
We’ve been evolving our LEGO storage & organisation for a few years now, and this solution has really been working well for us. The “Sort me!” drawer makes it faster to do a quick tidy, and keeping the plates handy in the storage box next to the unit keeps them out of sight when not in use, but easy to grab when needed. The biggest thing we’ve been happy about is being able to add drawers as the collection grows – for that reason they were definitely a good initial investment, even if a bit more expensive than the alternatives out there.
