How to organize Legos

I visited the amusement park Legoland in Carlsbad, California, last week for the first time. It was a fun outing. I'm a huge Disneyland fan, so it was nice to spend time at another, more low-key park. The best part about the experience, besides seeing things like an entire life-size car made completely out of Legos, was the parts of the park where you could just hang out and play with the little blocks. Of course, if you have a Lego set of your own (and we have lots of Legos in our house) you can play with them any time you want, but there's something about being in a place where you're supposed to have fun that frees you up to really enjoy playing around and building stuff.

I was also interested in how they organized the Legos at the park at these play centers. They have low (kid-height) tables with rectangles cut in the surface, and plastic bins fitted into the holes. The bins are full of Lego parts, and periodically, after kids (and adults) mess up all the Legos, an employee comes around with a wooden sweeper and sweeps them all back into the bins. There's no sorting by type or anything like that - hunting down the exact piece you need to complete your project is part of the fun.

Legoland bins.

There are lots of ingenious methods for organizing Legos at home, from a sieve-like box that separates the bricks by size when you shake it, to carrying cases and special boxes. There are actually so many products out there that Jeri's Organizing and Decluttering News devotes a post to 16 different Lego-organizing solutions! I asked my in-house Lego expert (aka my husband) how he's spent the last twenty-odd years organizing his Legos. He had a few tips:

• Organizing by size makes it easiest to find the piece you are looking for.
• Don't use a cardboard box to store Legos because they can get caught in the flaps and you can lose pieces.
• Small boxes, such as shoe box sized clear boxes, are ideal for storing Legos because they are small enough you can rummage through and see all the pieces in one box at a glance. If you use boxes with lids, you can stack them and even label the boxes if you are so inclined.*
• Use one of the boxes to store the instruction manuals that come with some Lego sets. If the pieces are organized, it doesn't matter if the bricks from the sets get combined.

*Lelah's note: I like The Container Store's clear shoe box for this purpose. They are sturdy, inexpensive, stack well, and are modular with the other boxes in this line.

Have fun playing with (and putting away) your Legos!

Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com. Sign up for Lelah's News, a once-monthly newsletter.

The Other Side of Organized

I'm in the middle of the book The Other Side of Organized by Linda Samuels. I heard about on professional organizer Monica Ricci's blog, and ordered it from Amazon recently as I wasn't able to get it from my library system. The slim book is organized by season and its subtitle is Finding Balance Between Chaos and Perfection. It differs from other books about organizing in that it doesn't focus on lots of concrete tips and specific ways to get organized, rather the author takes you on a journey about the different things being organized means.

A couple of things have stood out at me so far. One was about change. Samuels writes about her childhood being very stable and living in the same house for her entire life until she went away to college. She feels that this might be one reasons she says she has to work hard toward being flexible and embracing change instead of shying away from it.

I've been thinking a lot about how the things we see and do in childhood affect us as adults. People often ask me how I decided to be a professional organizer, and as part of the story I tell them that I have always been naturally disposed to being organized. This is true. I wasn't obsessive or extraordinarily neat, but I had a system for things and I was content when I had the clothes I wanted to wear to school laid out the night before, when I had my homework assignments all written out in a to-do list and every week I'd spend part of Sunday afternoon straightening my room and getting ready for the week ahead.

We moved every four or five years when I was growing up, sometimes more often. I think one gets used to saying goodbye to a space one has loved because you learn that you find different things to love about the new space you will inhabit. It makes you less afraid of change when you are exposed to it and it doesn't turn out badly at all.

Similarly, my mother never used the words "clutter clearing" or "purging," but every year or so we'd gather all the stuff we were no longer using or loved, from toys and clothes to artwork and furniture, and put it all outside for a garage sale. By the end of the day my mom would sell a book for 10 cents just to not have to bring it back inside the house! It was our version of clutter clearing and I always looked forward to it. It's funny to look back and realize the feeling of letting go, of renewal and finding the best in a changing situation is something I get to help people find through my professional life now.

My father is a different type, one who buys junk at garage sales and keeps empty (clean) peanut butter jars to store all his gnarly old screws he's picked up over the years, just in case he needs them someday. I feel lucky that I didn't inherit that inclination, but also glad that I've learned compassion for people who think like him.

Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com