Lego Taxonomy

I recently undertook, with my family, a project I actually scorned a few short years ago.  Growing up I had many Lego sets, and standard practice was to:

• build each model as it was received
• play with it for a while
• break it down and add its component parts to the Lego bucket

Over time I accrued what I thought was a large Lego collection, and I rarely felt limited in what I could build.

Fast forward 25 years.  I now have three avid Lego builders living with me (my three oldest), and they have jointly accumulated a respectable stockpile of bricks and sundries.  A few years ago my wife suggested that we sort the Legos by some system into more manageable containers than the large storage container they all occupied.  I told her that was a terrible idea, that I never needed such organization and I loved playing with my Legos.

Well it turns out I just hadn't reached critical Lego mass in my youth.  I would attribute this mainly to the fact that I was just one boy collecting sets, the next younger boy being six years my junior, so he barely started getting into Legos as I was moving on to other interests.  My three oldest, on the other hand, were all born in a span of three years.  The end result of this birth spacing is that they have received, and pooled, many Lego sets over their lifetimes, and the sheer number of bricks makes them very hard to store in one container or to play with effectively.  It's a lot of work to dig through a large, deep container for that one perfect piece to complete your model.

So, I ate my words, and two weeks ago we settled in for a three hour project with the whole family sorting Legos in the kitchen.  I was not sure of the best approach at first, but we just dug in and I winged it as best I could as the whole family immediately started asking "Dad - where does this one go?"

We settled on division by color, grouping sufficiently similar colors into one container, with a few exceptions.  The only false start we had was that light grey and dark grey soon outgrew their designated container, and so they were moved into their own individual buckets.  We also ended up having to find some larger containers for certain colors.  It was interesting to see what colors dominated by quantity.  In my original Lego collection red far outweighed any other color, which I believe was due to the early generic builder sets I first received.  I suppose if I'd had more space sets at that time (early 80's) I would have had more blue, or yellow had I had more castles, but that wasn't the case.  These days, at least for us, it would seem that all the Star Wars sets have made their mark, as black, light grey, and dark grey all top the charts.

Here's what the project looked like, splayed out over the kitchen counter:

Lego Sorting Is Fun!

In the end we had 15 containers, broken out as follows:

• Black [Sweater-box size] (this is the most numerous color)
• White [Sweater-box size]
• Light Grey [Sweater-box size]
• Dark Grey [Sweater-box size]
• Red [Sweater-box size] (includes regular, pink, and dark shades)
• Green [Gallon size] (includes regular, light, and dark shades)
• Yellow [Gallon size] (includes regular and gold)
• Brown [Gallon size] (includes brown, orange-brown, and tan)
• Orange [Gallon size]
• Blue [Gallon size] (includes blue, light, dark, and purple shades)
• Odd / Transparent [Gallon size] (includes transparent, chrome, and speckled)
• Doors and Windows [Gallon size] (includes frames, doors, sashes, and shudders)
• Mini-Figures and Accessories [Gallon size]
• Wheels and Axels [Gallon size]
• Technic [Gallon size] (gears, struts, rods, etc.)

I've had two worries since completing the project.  One is that the younger kids would spill the containers all over and hours of labor would be instantly undone.  So far that has not happened.  The second worry was that having everything sorted so precisely would make me less inclined to let the kids get out their Legos.  This actually has been a problem, but I'm trying to overcome it.  Everything just looks so nice and organized!