LEGO storage

We've tried a few different solutions to help corral the legos in our house. Nothing really seemed to work and legos continued to end up in unorganized piles and I never knew where a the tiny pieces I'd find here or there should go. I eventually convinced Chris we needed to sort them by color (which meant separating out all the sets which he was resistant to, for good reason) in order for each piece to have a place.

Camden and I (but mostly me) separated out all the legos into colors while watching a movie one night. We also made bins for people/creatures/themes (pirate and castle) and a few other categories.

While we were in Cincinatti, we stopped at IKEA to buy the storage supplies. We got a tiered Trofast unit (cheaper than the two side-by-side units from the tutorial but with the same amount of storage) and several bins. We also picked this unit over the other because you can fit the smaller bins back-to-back in one slot.

At home, Camden and I used my Sillouette cutting machine to cut vinyl letters for each bin. They're removable so we could change the names of the bins whenever.

We put the unit into Camden's closet only to discover his sliding doors were blocking the far bins (oops!). Since his Lego storage now takes up the majority of the closet floor, we decided just to remove the doors for now. I got cheap curtains and a wooden dowel rod from Lowes to provide a way to hide all the closet clutter (not pictured).

Advantages: anyone can put a Lego piece where it goes, if you need a piece you know right where to look, you can more easily make creations from random instructions found online since the pieces are color coded
Disadvantages: all of the sets are now separated, so you can't just grab a set and go build it unless you collect all of the pieces first