If you have kids between the ages of four and forty, you probably have/had Legos in your home.  While I love this creative building toy, I don’t love all the teeny tiny pieces that get strewn about the house, vacuumed up, and inevitably, stepped on.  When we remodeled our basement, we made a few layout changes that helped us in the Lego department.

Before demolition, a door opened from the long end of the under stair storage, going into an unlit, unfinished dumping ground for junk.

As this is also just inside the garage entrance, we decided to carve out a little space to create a mini mudroom.  At 18 inches deep and six feet wide, it covers the former entrance.

However, just around the corner, inside the bedroom is a three foot deep closet with an opening to access the under stair area.

Sure, we could have left it unfinished, but for little effort and money, we decided to finish it.  In the photo below, taken at the entrance, the blue wall on the left backs the mud nook.  With short ceilings, we decided to turn this space into a cozy reading/Lego play space for our boys, that can double as storage space down the road.

Keeping the house tidy and organized is literally a sanity saver for me, and this space is no exception.  Coming down to vacuum and seeing a Lego explosion one too many times, I knew we had to come up with a good storage system.

After discussing with the boys, they said they look for specific colors when building.  The three of us got to work, sorting the colors into lidded shoe box sized plastic bins and called it a day.  Those bins worked for a while, but the small space didn’t leave room to play when they had all bins open at once.  Fast forward a few more times of seeing the Lego covered floor and I asked why they were dumping out full bins.  Their answer?  To find the itty bitty pieces that inevitably fall to the bottom of the bins.  Thus, our current storage system was born.

Tucked under the short stair slope, we have cheapie stacking bins with an angled front that allows access, without taking up loads of floor space.  All large pieces go into these bins.

Black and gray take up two bins each, but every other color fits nicely into one bin, including the minifigures.  Built or half built kits fill the top row of bins.

In the small gap to the side, we store the large baseplates against the wall.  Three expanding pockets keep the instruction manuals contained and organized.

Just to the side, a small 60 drawer storage bin, usually used for nuts, bolts, and such, keeps all the small bits organized.

Single pieces in the first column, special 2 brick pieces in the next.  Minifig accessories, weapons, special connecting pieces, car parts, and such each have a drawer, sorted by color.

All those small pieces are easy to find, with one tiny drawer to dump, search through, and clean up.  The space on top displays a rotation of favorite builds.

It’s a flexible system that can grow with their Lego collection, as it simply requires a few more stacking bins.  My love of labels/OCD really wants to label the stacking bins for the full effect.  Do you have Legos all over your house?  How do you contain and tame the jungle of plastic pieces?