Storage and Sorting LEGO

[bonox]

I have some lego stored in my garage, and I anticipate freezing temperatures in there from time to time this winter, down to say about -10 C. Any concerns?

I wouldn't worry. According to general manufacturers data (which you can google), it's generally usable from about -20 to +80 celcius. Above that it softens a bit.

[BimmerBoy]

does anyone use Lego to store Lego?

I use Lego Pick-A-Brick (or I guess I should now say Pick-And-Build) cups for a lot of sorting/storage. I like reusing things, these are stackable to some degree and I can easily put them in a tall RubberMaid tote bin which I can then move wherever for storage. I generally use the cups for smaller pieces or elements that I have a few of. Things like 1x1 plates and tiles, small smooth slope pieces, minifigure accessories, and so on.

[bananaworld]

Newbie here, daunted by the task of reading through 1250 posts... (And search didn't dig out the results.)

Should I sort by colour OR brick type?

I know the ideal answer is 'both!' but that isn't feasible (currently...)

Is it more useful to have bags/boxes of the same colour or the same brick? Colour seems sensible, but what if I want to roughly model a MOC using, say, 4x1 bricks, and colour isn't an issue for that? Dig out all those same bricks from all the colour bags?

Hmmm, there's not really a catch-all solution, until the clear-fronted drawer units materialise. One day....!

[DraikNova]

Better to sort by type. If you put all things of one color together, you won't be able to distinguish the parts you want from the other ones that easily, because the drawer will just look like a blob of one color.

[antp]

If you can't sort by both type and colors, for rare colors it may still be useful to keep them together or else you may have difficult to locate the very few parts of [some rare color] in the middle of the black/red/yellow/blue/white parts.

Except for parts where color is not important or irrelevant of course.

Edited October 2, 2015 by antp

[Darkdragon]

Should I sort by colour OR brick type?

I know the ideal answer is 'both!' but that isn't feasible (currently...)

Is it more useful to have bags/boxes of the same colour or the same brick? Colour seems sensible, but what if I want to roughly model a MOC using, say, 4x1 bricks, and colour isn't an issue for that? Dig out all those same bricks from all the colour bags?

It really all depends on how you build. Some people build by color - they want to make a grey castle, so they pull out all the grey parts and make it work. Some build by style (?) decide what they want the build to be and pull out the parts in the colors they want to make it work.

For myself, I find it very near impossible to find the part I want in a big bucket of browns, for example. I sort by part and if there is a nee/space by color within that. As a previous post said, it's good to keep rare colors together though if you can.

[fred67]

Both. It is feasible - because you don't necessarily need to split up all the parts immediately. I've realized it's sort of an organic process, and it depends on how your collection is growing.

Example: your first sort, you look at your collection and half of it is white. Maybe it's enough to just split the white out... and then you look at the white pieces and half of them are 2x4... so you split out the 2x4 from the rest of the white. If you have very little of some less common colors, you can split them out and keep all the various parts together for just that color. When you start getting a lot of a certain part OR a certain color, you split them out from the rest. Then, let's say you split off all your 1x2s, if you find you have a lot of one color, you split that color off.

As the previous post said (and I've said it before), just sorting by color - if you have a lot of various pieces in that color, is bad... finding a red 2x2 in a bucket of 2x2s is easy; finding a red 2x2 in a bucket of red is very difficult.

The whole point is to make it easy to find pieces, after all... so the answer is most certainly "both," but that you don't have to do everything all at once. Just once you get a lot of "something," you split off that something to it's own separate bin. That "something" can be a color OR a part type.

[Andy D]

@fred67... Excellent, simplified description of a sorting process. form/function first, then color. I like your description for a collector just starting to organize. I never thought of it the way you described it, but this does describe he way I started (and continue) to sort... Pieces of commonality, then split as more of a type or color are involved.

Your description is an even simpler description than the (many, many step) evolution of LEGO sorting post earlier in this thread, and appeared on LUGNUT in January of 2001

It appears that there have been discussions on LEGO sorting since AFOLs (and others) started interacting with each other.

Andy D

Edited October 3, 2015 by Andy D

[bonox]

something like this:

Thanks for this post fred. I took your idea for my storage. It's on trial at the moment while I work out if any changes should be made, then it'll get edging and a door.

The wheels make it simple to move around and handy to store out of the way of the rest of the family

Made 30mm short of the doorway heights. I'll need to redo it if I ever get carpet or a floating floor

[fred67]

^^^ Wow, nice job. You look like you can store a ton of LEGO in an easily accessible way. I know a lot of people like the Akro-Mills style cases (and so do I), but if you don't have room for a wall of them, you can get much denser storage this way.

I find that, when I build, I pull two or three of these out and have the vast majority of pieces I need.

[Vodnik]

Very effective space-wise, but accessibility isn't great. To get one small part out you need to remove the case, unlock it, open the lid, take out the part, close the lid, lock it and put the case back in the rack... To be honest I also use this kind of cases, but I only have five of them and it already gets annoying when I need to unlock and open the lids all the time. And they take so much space when open that keeping several of them open at the same time is difficult with the limited space I have...

[fred67]

^^ Yes, it's true that under those circumstances, it can be annoying and not very convenient. And yet, if you go with Akro-Mills (or the other brands that make those kinds of things), you lose storage space. So one simply has to choose what works better for them.

When I need to "store" the extra little bits that come with a set after I'm done building it, it's really damn annoying. When I'm building my own stuff, I pull out two or three cases and have nearly everything I need at arms length.

[Andy D]

No storage solution is perfect for everyone, maybe not for anyone. But there are solutions that makes it easy as possible for each of us.

The Arkro-Mills cabinets are good, but space hogs (for my space). Even with my solution, which helps keep my studio looking neat, it sometimes (well usually) requires me to have 2 or 3 of my 15 quart storage bins out when building.

The tower of Stanley boxes looks like a good solution for space (very creative) and as good as any other for convenience.

It's all about what works for you.

Andy D

[bonox]

Very effective space-wise, but accessibility isn't great. To get one small part out you need to remove the case, unlock it, open the lid, take out the part, close the lid, lock it and put the case back in the rack... To be honest I also use this kind of cases, but I only have five of them and it already gets annoying when I need to unlock and open the lids all the time. And they take so much space when open that keeping several of them open at the same time is difficult with the limited space I have...

I rarely to never lock the boxes, so it isn't hard to just flip them open. I also generally only need a dozen or so parts at a time, so I pull all those inner trays out of the boxes, put those on the build desk and the rest go back in the crate. You can also leave the outer boxes strewn all over the floor, which it what I used to do. Just because you've got a rack to put them in doesn't mean they have to live there all the time.

[bonox]

I've also found that if you take the lids off them, they'll slide out and sit like drawers (if you don't pull them all the way and there's a box above it). If I were going to do that though, i'd use much cheaper boxes and put upper stop rails in. But i'm not, so I won't.

[CisFran]

I would love to see the storage solutions of those bricklink sellers who have atleast a million pieces on their inventories

[zux]

I would love to see the storage solutions of those bricklink sellers who have atleast a million pieces on their inventories

We have a LUG member who has a BL shop. Not a million, but he has about 600-700k pieces. Some storage pictures could be seen here.

[6ix]

Hi,

I only collect, build and display sets. I'm at a point that the number of sets I have exceeds my display space and want to dismantel some sets for future rebuild. I want to store the bricks per set. I don't keep the boxes and I dislike storing in plastic bags. So basically I'm looking for storing in plastic containers, preferably all of the same size (so big sets get multiple containers). But buying food containers, for example, can get very expensive, when you need lots of them.

At the moment I have a few of these containers, these are very expensive though (but very nice):

https://www.rostimepalshop.nl/bewaren/bewaardozen-modula.html

So basically, I'm looking for cheap food storage containers, available in The Netherlands. Any tips / advice?

Thanks!

[fred67]

^^ Those do look expensive.

I use these.

Right now they are $0.87/each at my local Target. That's even cheaper than the comparable (but smaller) version they sell at WalMart. When I did a complete overhaul of my LEGO, I bought at least 30 of them for temporary (for the most part) storage while I sorted them into my other organizers. Some remained with certain types of pieces that I had a lot of ("overflow" when I couldn't fit all of a part into the organizer), and most are now being used to store old sets so that I can build and display new ones. I put a sticker on the end with the set name and number, and a "X of Y" when a set takes up Y number of boxes.

EDIT: Bonus - the indented top fits the bottom, so they stack well.

Edited October 7, 2015 by fred67

[Umbra-Manis]

^^ Those do look expensive.

I use these.

Right now they are $0.87/each at my local Target. That's even cheaper than the comparable (but smaller) version they sell at WalMart. When I did a complete overhaul of my LEGO, I bought at least 30 of them for temporary (for the most part) storage while I sorted them into my other organizers. Some remained with certain types of pieces that I had a lot of ("overflow" when I couldn't fit all of a part into the organizer), and most are now being used to store old sets so that I can build and display new ones. I put a sticker on the end with the set name and number, and a "X of Y" when a set takes up Y number of boxes.

EDIT: Bonus - the indented top fits the bottom, so they stack well.

That is exactly what i'm using!

[CisFran]

We have a LUG member who has a BL shop. Not a million, but he has about 600-700k pieces. Some storage pictures could be seen here.

Thanks for the link! Nice pictures in there!

[6ix]

^^ Those do look expensive.

I use these.

Right now they are $0.87/each at my local Target. That's even cheaper than the comparable (but smaller) version they sell at WalMart. When I did a complete overhaul of my LEGO, I bought at least 30 of them for temporary (for the most part) storage while I sorted them into my other organizers. Some remained with certain types of pieces that I had a lot of ("overflow" when I couldn't fit all of a part into the organizer), and most are now being used to store old sets so that I can build and display new ones. I put a sticker on the end with the set name and number, and a "X of Y" when a set takes up Y number of boxes.

EDIT: Bonus - the indented top fits the bottom, so they stack well.

Something like that, yes. I don't think I can get these in The Netherlands, alas.

[splatman]

If you need an idea, YouTube user Jimmy Diresta built a

along the lines of a card catalog. If you or someone you know works wood, this might be a solution. Old card catalogs may work just as well. Check Craigslist or university auctions. Edited October 8, 2015 by splatman

[lottie_cat]

Out of curiousity, does anyone out here store/display their LEGO collection entirely in their 'complete' forms? We have a collection of 1200+ sets (according to brickset, which would include many CMFs, so not all giants) and we don't break them down. We modify and MOC with loose brick purchases, but set them up in displays rather than just boxing up as the individual bricks...

We've builders starting today on a (single car) garage conversion for the plague of our collectibles to be re-housed (everyone is tired of stepping over, dancing around, having to hold their drinks as the coffee table is full to bursting at this point, etc, etc, with the LEGO)

But... Well, there are still on-going household arguments over the best options for display! I'm wondering if people have ideas/photos of their own solutions/general advice, etc, for storage.

[bonox]

raise the floor a foot, put a structural glass walkway over it and live on your collection.