Lego storage has become one of our principal housekeeping issues.  It impedes vacuuming, a positive mother-son relationship, and the health of my feet.  Friends, I think I may have found a solution. 

If your feet bear permanent scars from stepping on lego bricks...
If you've ever spent hours sorting and organizing legos, only to discover that they've all been dumped into a huge pile...
If you've ever considered having a cement truck back up to the basement window just to get rid of the minefield of legos...

then this post is for you.

We've accumulated a small mountain of legos, and I've tried numerous and sundry lego storage solutions, including the cool BOX4BLOX - Lego Toy Storage Organizer (One Unit).   They've either been too small to handle our collection, or too much work to keep up with.  We had a mish-mash of lego bins, because the big bins are too deep to dig through, but the shallow bins don't hold as much or fit on our shelves very well.  And then we have one shelf that's devoted to the lego masterpieces that cannot be broken up and stored. 

Every time we cleaned up, we'd have to pick up a bajillion tiny pieces, and while doing so, the kids would find *the* piece that they've been looking for and totally forget that they're supposed to be cleaning and get sucked back into Legoland.
 
can you hear the digging?

The result was lego building sprees that just never ended, and the pieces would get tracked all over the house.  And since my toddler loves playing with them too, I do mean *ALL* over the house.

Then, I decided that cementing them into the floor was a good idea.  Except that was too expensive.

This is one of the more successful ideas that I've implemented for cleaning.  Meet the dust pan...aka 'the scooper'.  So at least we're picking up dozens of pieces and not just one at a time. 

The scooper was an improvement, but it didn't fix the overall lego storage problem.

It finally dawned on me that the best way to pick up legos is all at once.  As in, put a mat down under them, and just put away the mat with the legos inside.  So here's what I came up with...

I bought a green and a blue curtain panel at the Goodwill for $1.50 each.  I cut the loops off the green curtain, and stitched the two panels together down the middle.  Now we have a nice, big two-tone mat.  Then I stitched one loop on each corner, and they work like handles. 


When you want to clean up the legos, you just scoop any escapees back onto the mat, and then pick up the four handles like this:

a ginormous sack of legos

Then, instead of the measley flat bins, you can get a big boy storage tub.  I took out the bigger flat panels, and stand those on the side...and toss the instruction manuals into the bottom of the tub

Tie the handles loosely if you wanna, and just toss that bad boy into the tub.

voila!


Compared to our usual routine, this is a cakewalk.  The big bin fits on the bottom shelf, and takes up half the space of all the smaller containers we used to have.

When you're ready to play again, just take out the sack-o-legos...

and spread the mat out on the floor. 

Mt. Saint Lego is reborn, and ready for play.

But wait kids, there's MORE!


You can choose if you want to build on the green 'grass' side of the mat, or the blue 'water' side.  If you want to build a village in the grass, you just pick up the green side of the mat...

and dump all the legos into the sea.  Where you can dig and play to your hearts content.


...and we all lived happily ever after in Legoland.

What are your lego storage solutions?  If you try this, please let me know how you like it!  So far, it's working like a charm here.