The LEGO Storage Guide
This in-depth guide helps you understand your LEGO collection, find the best way to organize your LEGO bricks, and discover the best LEGO storage for your home and budget. It also includes recommendations for displaying and storing your LEGO minifigures.
Introduction
Table of Contents
- Section I: Organizing, Sorting, & Storing LEGO Bricks
- Chapter 1: Understanding your LEGO Collection
- Chapter 2: Organizing your LEGO Bricks
- Chapter 3: LEGO Storage for Small Collections
- Chapter 4: LEGO Storage for Medium Collections
- Chapter 5: LEGO Storage for Large Collections
- Chapter 6: Additional LEGO Brick Storage Tips & Tricks
- Section II: Displaying & Storing LEGO Minifigures
- Appendix: Glossary & Bibliography
- Appendix: Version History & Acknowledgements
While this guide has already helped more than 100,000 LEGO enthusiasts organize their LEGO collection, your feedback makes it even better… If you have questions or suggestions, leave a comment below or email me at tom@tomalphin.com. Thanks!
I’ve got a lego organising job coming up soon and I’m going to organise my categories into zip lock bags first. This is the first time I’ll be organising lego, composing of all of my, now, older boys lego, and I think this is a cost effective way to start. You can get 50 variously sized zip lock bags from Amazon for about £10. Once I have organised the parts I will be able to see what size plastic container that I’ll need for them and then reuse the bags for further parts in smaller numbers or much smaller parts. This article was great for pointing me in the right direction. Thanks.
That seems like a good and economical approach for getting started. Once everything is sorted, you will have a much better sense of what type of long-term storage to use.
—Tom
P.S. I would recommend using the hierarchy of categories and sub-categories included in my LEGO Parts Guide as it reflects an updated thinking about the best top-level categories when sorting a lot of LEGO… https://brickarchitect.com/parts/
I hope someday you will put out another book
Awesome site! I love the storage ideas for bricks, minifigs, and the comment for storing instructions in comic book sleeves.
We often have sets or projects that we want to proudly display, upwards of 50 at a time. Any recommendations or resources on display storage?
I have my legos in this unorganized string bag thing. This feels like a stupid question, but I’m planning on asking my parents to get me a Lego Harry Potter set. should I try to keep it for display and away from the bag?
Holly, It depends on what you want to do with your LEGO Collection. I personally think that it often makes sense to keep a brand new set that you really enjoyed building on display for a little while before breaking it up to create something new. That said, it is meant to be played with and you should have fun with it!
What do you suggest for organizing pieces while building sets? I’ve just go into the Technic Cars series so some are not in part numbered bags. I’ve been trying to find some sort of tray to organize the parts into but am struggling to find anything suitable. I’ve tried using takeaway containers but am finding them a little cumbersome when you have a dozen different ports on the desk.
I do not usually sort parts when building sets, especially with the innovation in recent years to include numbered bags. With the numbered bags, you rarely need to worry about more than about 200 pieces at a time.
That said, some people do like to use shallow sorting trays when building new sets. I do not have a specific brand to recommend; I personally just use the sorting trays that came with #21050 LEGO Architecture Studio set when I need to do some quick sorting.
I especially love the search-spreadsheet idea!
Regarding storage for instructions: the most useful suggestion I received was to use magazine sleeves and boards, like a comic book collection. This turned my disorganized pile of crumpled instructions into a tidy pair of boxes. The stiff boards equalize the various sizes of the instruction booklets. The sleeves allow me to keep instructions with more than one booklet together.
Lego storage guide and printable labels on ios ?
You can certainly view the LEGO Storage Guide on your web browser in iOS, but unfortunately the Labels require a Mac or PC. – because you need those platforms to open the Brother .lbx files.
—Tom
Hello
Hello!
Love this guide, I am in the process of organising my large collection but I have a question. Organising most of my collection will take a while but will be relatively straightforward, however, I am wondering what to do with the parts that have stickers on? A lot of my collection is technic and some sets seem to have pages of stickers but if I want to rebuild the set I don’t want to have to search through multiple different part stores to find all the relevant stickers and if you can’t see it until your part way through you then have to do an extra search while trying to build…. any idea that would work will be great?
You will need to find your own way to sort printed parts. That said, I will say that many folks put printed or stickered tiles on a flexible 32×32 baseplate.
You wanted regional solutions – for those in Canada, the substitute for the Akro-mils cabinets are Mastercraft cabinets from Canadian Tire. They come in several configurations, are stackable, and wall-mountable as well. They are very similar in size to the Akro-mils ones and the labels fit on them nicely.
For the larger pieces, Canadian company KIS has several sized of locking-lid clear tubs. I find that the 2.1L tubs work very well and the lids won’t come off even if you drop a stack of them on the floor from waist height.
Princess Auto also has these on sale a few times a year.
I had been struggling with my LEGO storage having all my LEGO in 8 containers with 5 storage areas in each. I then came across this guide and decided on the Large collection method based on the number of pieces (not overall volume of LEGO). I looked at the drawers and was wondering if I needed 1 or 4. I went for 4. Quickly I realised it would not be enough so ordered 4 more. And then needed more again. 12 cabinets later, I am sorted.
So, when you set out to do this properly, prepare also for the number of cabinet space, and the resulting time it takes to sort ~600 pieces of LEGO, then label them.
I also created an excel spreadsheet that match the layout of the draws, so if i want to find anything, I type in the item number (or description) into the search, and it shows me the exact location that part is in (need to have the letters and numbers on the side of the boxes for this to work).
Love this guide! Just ordered 2 Akro Mils storage units for my son’s lego collection. Look forward to more building, and less searching..