Chaos or order: how do you tidy up Lego «properly»?
Lego primarily sells sets. But what happens after you’re done building? Are they untouchable? Or can the bricks be chucked into a massive box?
My daughter recently dug out her Lego treasures again. The sets and bricks are stored in various boxes and cartons. Some of them are already assembled street sweepers, houses and camping trailers from the City series. Others are building bricks of various origins thrown randomly into a box – bricks my wife and I gifted her when she was a child. Many black, white and grey bricks come from the Japanese castle of a Lego imitator, which I built for test purposes once.
When we’re playing, but even more so when tidying up afterwards, we’ve asked ourselves how people actually «store» Lego. My wife and I have very different approaches here.
My approach: put everything in a big box!
That’s how I was raised. As children, my siblings and I had a big plastic box that contained all our Lego bricks. We’d take it out of the cupboard and tip the contents onto the carpet. Or we’d rummage through it in search of the perfect brick for our next building project. It was always a hell of a racket that must’ve driven my parents crazy. My apologies, folks!
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My wife’s approach: leave the sets together
When our daughter builds a town these days, it consists of different sets, each built strictly according to instructions. I hardly manage to remember which parts belong to which set. At a skate park there’s a figure on a skateboard, at a residential building there’s one on a bicycle. If one goes to visit the other, they have to be back at «their» set in time for tidying. So my wife says. Because only then will the thingsshe believes belongs together stay together.
I’d rather shove everything in a box after playing. Irrespective of losing any pieces. If it were up to me, accessories from the individual sets and everything that’s not firmly connected would get mixed up into a chaos of bricks. But I respect my wife’s love of order. We have a number of fabric bags for smaller Lego sets and still have the original boxes for other sets. Road pieces, trees and traffic signs are placed in their own box. After all, vehicles that form a stable unit are allowed to be put in one box together with others.
Source: Reddit
Tidying systems require investments
The cloth bags are still the cheapest way to keep things tidy. You’ll generate more sales for Lego – and for Galaxus – if you rely on more sophisticated solutions.
The Lego press office wrote back to me in great detail about the products available for storing Lego bricks and sets. Actually, I wanted to know whether the manufacturer has any findings from market research on how the majority of the playing public tidies up their little pieces. But it didn’t. Instead, it offers a range of products that everyone should be happy with according to their individual love of order.
The easiest case is with minifigures. If you don’t want to play with them, but rather just collect them, you’ll find separate display cases.
Assembled sets, on the other hand, need larger compartments. Drawer boxes are ideal for these. They’re of course available from Lego (for a relatively high price) or from other manufacturers, some of them even on wheels. Or you can opt for a system from Rotho, for example. That way, you can store pieces of various sizes. If need be, fill a whole shelf with the storage boxes.
Lego purists will probably shake their heads and insist that Lego should only be stored in Lego boxes. Of course, the Storage Bricks look good, but they offer less space than you might think. The fact that they’re not transparent and always have to be stacked back and forth could also drive you crazy. On the other hand, what’s nicer than stacking Lego bricks for your Lego bricks?
Lego and the question of storage
How do you store Lego bricks and sets?
Header image: Martin Jungfer
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Martin Jungfer
Head of Content
Martin.Jungfer@digitecgalaxus.chJournalist since 1997. Stopovers in Franconia (or the Franken region), Lake Constance, Obwalden, Nidwalden and Zurich. Father since 2014. Expert in editorial organisation and motivation. Focus on sustainability, home office tools, beautiful things for the home, creative toys and sports equipment.
