Letting go of my OCD tendencies while still keeping organized (with LEGO anyway)

Asher has a lot of LEGOs. And I mean a lot.

We have one hard rule about the LEGOs, and that's that they absolutely do not leave Asher's play room.

Here's why:

LEGO eater

The problem is they're starting to take over the play room. We've got two tables in there for Asher to use as surfaces for playing, but both of them are almost completely covered with LEGOs. Not ideal.


My dad had bought him a cabinet a while back for storage. It's super fun, but we noticed it became more convenient to just throw pieces into the various drawers than organizing them, so none of us had any idea what was in there. Plus Asher's LEGO collection was outgrowing the cabinet space.

The LEGOs we couldn't fit in the cabinet were thrown into a giant Ziplock bag. Again, not ideal for building.

Something needed to be done.

I had grand plans of doing a major LEGO organization project. I was going to spend as long as necessary to meticulously separate each type of block and store them in individual boxes. I figured that way Asher could find the exact piece he needed much more easily than digging through his Ziplock bag.

But then one night I actually sat down and played LEGOs with Asher.

He made several piles of LEGOs and instructed me to construct various things out of the piles. He used all different types of blocks to make cars and airplanes. He switched the legs and torsos of the LEGO people.

I realized Asher didn't search for pieces any more specific than color or general size. He just used whatever he found. That was part of the fun.

So I started thinking about my original idea of sorting the LEGO pieces. I realized it just wasn't appropriate for this stage of play. I thought about how, when Asher gets a new LEGO kit, he carefully follows the instructions and builds it properly. Then he plays with it. Then, after a while, he starts taking pieces off and adding new ones to create something unique. He never rebuilds the project exactly like the instructions say. And that was why I had initially wanted to separate each type of block - so that he could use the instructions to rebuild things. But really all he needed was a way to store the LEGOs so that he could easily get to all of them.

So instead of buying a ton of tiny organizational boxes for individual pieces, I bought three big containers with lids and dumped in every LEGO piece Asher had.

The OCD side of me had a hard time combining all the pieces from all the different kits, but in the end I knew a lot of the kits were incomplete because - surprise - Asher had added or taken away pieces to create new things.

The only things I did separate out from the rest were the LEGO mini figures. Asher and I carefully sorted through all the LEGO pieces to find the mini figures and their accessories (stray hats, hair, backpacks, etc.) and put them in a separate container.

And I did still keep the instruction booklets from all of the LEGO kits we've collected. I suspect when he's older Asher might like to re-build some of them, so I stored them in one of the drawers in the LEGO cabinet. It's hard to tell from this angle, but those stacks of books are pretty high! I'm glad I managed to hang on to all of them.

In the end, I have one very happy little boy. He exclaimed several times, "Wow, I really have a lot of LEGOs!" and continually thanked me for buying the containers because now he could really see all the LEGOs he had.

He spent hours building new vehicles and setting up all his LEGO people into armies.

And now the play room is that much more organized, which makes both Asher and me very happy. And did I mention that clean-up is a breeze? We just dump everything into the bins, put the lids on, and stack the containers. Done in minutes.

Happy, happy, happy.