If your feet bear permanent scars from stepping on lego bricks…
If you’ve ever spent hours sorting and organizing legos, only to discover that they’ve all been dumped into a huge pile…
If you’ve ever considered having a cement truck back up to the basement window just to get rid of the minefield of legos…
then this post is for you.
We’ve accumulated a small mountain of legos, and I’ve tried numerous and sundry lego storage solutions, including the cool BOX4BLOX – Lego Toy Storage Organizer (One Unit).
They’ve either been too small to handle our collection, or too much work to keep up with. We had a mish-mash of lego bins, because the big bins are too deep to dig through, but the shallow bins don’t hold as much or fit on our shelves very well. And then we have one shelf that’s devoted to the lego masterpieces that cannot be broken up and stored.
and while doing so, the kids would find *the* piece that they’ve been
looking for and totally forget that they’re supposed to be cleaning and
get sucked back into Legoland.
can you hear the digging?
The result was lego building sprees that just never ended, and the pieces would get tracked all over the house. And since my toddler loves playing with them too, I do mean *ALL* over the house.
Then, I decided that cementing them into the floor was a good idea. Except that was too expensive.
This is one of the more successful ideas that I’ve implemented for cleaning. Meet the dust pan…aka ‘the scooper’. So at least we’re picking up dozens of pieces and not just one at a time.
The scooper was an improvement, but it didn’t fix the overall lego storage
problem.
It finally dawned on me that the best way to pick up legos is all at once. As in, put a mat down under them, and just put away the mat with the legos inside. So here’s what I came up with…
I bought a green curtain, and a blue curtain panel at the Goodwill for $1.50 each. I wanted a water/grass effect. I cut the loops off the green curtain, and stitched the two panels together down the middle. Now we have a nice, big two-tone mat. Then I stitched one loop on each corner, and they work like handles.
a ginormous sack of legos
voila!
When you’re ready to play again, just take out the sack-o-legos…
and spread the mat out on the floor.
But wait kids, there’s MORE!
…and we all lived happily ever after in Legoland.
Michelle says
Brilliant! I’m staring at a big pile of legos on my floor right now!
Gwen Brown says
They get just a little out of hand, don’t they. 🙂
Kristine says
I had to laugh at your one cute little bucket and scoop. My son has 3 full buckets and has used a snow shovel (!) to scoop them when I finally can’t take it anymore. Luckily he mostly keeps his Legos’s in his room now that he’s a bit older. I wish I’d thought of something like this when he was younger!!!
Lori Madison says
Where did you get that LEGO raised base? Kinda looks like mountains with a stream in the middle. Thanks!!
Gwen Brown says
Hi Lori! We found that one at a local thrift shop. Cool, huh! 🙂 You could check ebay if you can’t find one locally.