How to organize your Lego bricks for efficient building

If you spend any time at all with Lego, then the sight above is probably a familiar one: a giant bin full of assorted Lego bricks and parts. As a kid, this was about the pinnacle of my organizational skills (hey, they're in a box, right?) but I'm sure that in aggregate I wasted several years of my life pawing through boxes like this trying to find the next piece that I needed.

Twenty years later I have Lego again, but much less tolerance for digging through piles. So how can we make things better? In this article we show off some of the tricks that we use to keep our stacks organized, so that we can spend our Lego time building efficiently, not looking for bricks. (Warning: article is image heavy!)

One obvious but not particularly good solution is to get a big set of drawers to store the bricks in. The chief problem with this is one of scalability: For a big collection, you need an awful lot of drawers, particularly for common large bricks. Secondly, the drawers are not fully mostly opaque, and you can spend a lot of time pulling out one drawer after another looking for what you need, even if they are well labeled. Larger drawers also suffer from the usual "pile" problem: Even in a medium-sized bin of sorted parts, it can be hard to tell how many are there in each color.

You could also consider sorting bricks into plastic bags, but this doesn't really solve the fundamental organizational issue, because you've still got to find a way to file and display the plastic bags.

A solution that we like better is to simply stack bricks of like kind together, forming large neat structures that are easy to pick out of a large bin. However this has to be executed with some care. Consider the following picture:

What we have here is a compact and space efficient stack: two 2x2 flat plates stuck together. However, it's an abomination: those pieces are really stuck together. Even the godsend brick separator is all but useless in this particular case and there is hardly any non-destructive way to get the damn bricks apart. (A plastic putty knife or thin guitar pick can work, with effort.)

That naturally leads to our requirement that stacks be easy to separate. If not, you could end up spending all your time trying to get the bricks apart, which isn't much of an improvement versus digging for them. In what follows, we illustrate some of the basic types of large organized stacks that hold together firmly, give easy access, and can always be separated easily.

First off, here is a much better way to stack and store 2x2 flat plates. Each layer alternates a single flat plate with two flat plates side by side. You can make a long stick like this and it is very robust-- if you place it in the bin with other big stacks it will come out in one piece. Yet, it is trivially easy to break it apart anywhere you want to-- even if you need to get to that one green square in the middle of the stack.

You can of course use the same stacking method with 2x2 round plates, although it ends up looking quite different and does not hold together quite as well. Recommended solutions: (1) Store these in a bin for small parts, unless you use them a lot or (2) follow the method for stacking 2x2 thick bricks shown later, rather than the method for 2x2 flat plates.

There are, of course, some small parts that really are better off not built into stacks.

We organize our small Technic pieces in this divided fishing tackle box with a locking lid. Note that as opposed to the set-of-drawers method, this lets you see-- and access-- everything at once.

We also keep a separate box for similarly small non-technic pieces.

Speaking of small parts, these are our smallest parts that can be stacked. These 1x1 flat plates form neat columns that we store in the non-technic small parts bin.

There's no trick to this, so why bother? It turns out to be useful because you can see what you've got at a glance-- much more easily than with a drawer full of mixed pieces. (Do I have three blue round one-by-one plates?) Also, the columns are much easier to work with. With my much-larger-than-kid-size fingers, it usually takes a couple tries to reach into a tiny bin and pick out (for example) a transparent red round piece rather than a green one. Working with the stacks instead, you can just pull out the column that you want and pick off the pieces that you need.

Build your own great wall. 2x2 full-height bricks are easy to deal with-- these stacks are sturdy and always easy to disassemble.

For 2x3 full height bricks, build a tower with a 1x1 hole in the middle. Alternate the two possible configurations on successive layers.

Painfully simple: A stack of 2x6 flat plates.

One Borg Cube's worth of 1x8 full height bricks. These are fairly easy to separate out, but youngsters may want to emulate the method of the 1x8 flat plates (below) for something that's less space-efficient but easier to separate.

1x2 flat plates. While this particular arrangement is very space-efficient, it isn't so easy to take apart-- keep a brick separator handy if you use this configuration. While you can stack these in some other ways (e.g., the great wall configuration), they are still hard to take apart. Often, a better bet is to keep them in a small parts bin.

Assorted large flat pieces can be stored together by stacking them, each offset by at least one unit. Depending on how many you have, it may be better to create a few separate stacks.

2x6 Bricks. This one may actually be a little bit on the dense side, it can take a brick separator for kids to break these off. Youngsters may want to emulate the 2x6 flat brick stacking method instead.

I like this method for stacking 1x8 flat plates a lot-- not only is it efficient, but it looks cool.

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