To not be able to cope with lego?

[SayMumOneMoreTime]

Now don't get me wrong, I love lego, it's a brilliant toy for all the reasons we already know.

My 6 year old loves building new sets, and also inventing his own designs. We encourage his interest, especially using his existing stuff creatively.

The issue is the quantity! Grandparents buy him new sets because that's what he asks for, and he saves up his £1 a week pocket money and buys his own. He is obsessed with new sets.

All the pieces are mixed up, I have tried in vain to organise and keep sets together so he can rebuild them. It feels like I need a week of annual leave to complete the job! Everything gets mixed up (my 3 year old has just this minute tipped out 4 of the 9 trays all over the bedroom floor) as soon as any progress is made with sorting.

He will not hear of giving it away, and it's a mess anyway so no good for a new owner without being sorted.

How can I manage the lego levels? If you have a lego obsessed child how do you manage the quantity? Should I expect more from my child in terms of sorting and buying less?

Help!

We are drowning in Lego. The only way to manage it at this volume (imo) are the floor bags. They are life changing. They beauty is that they never need to be 'tidied'. You just pull the drawstring when you're done.

I agree with keeping instruction booklets, but not trying to keep sets together. Storing booklets is even more of a pita to me than storing Lego.

I don’t bother keeping booklets as Lego has them all online now. You could just download them if you are worried about them disappearing. Then just pull them up on a phone/tablet/computer if needed.

We tried the bags that become mats but I never got on with them. The Lego always migrated off the mat anyway and I found they didn’t store neatly when bagged up. Boxes can stack neatly at least.

I’m currently trying to work out where I can put more shelves for my Lego sets, mine do stay built. Worth knowing that a decent paintbrush (for walls not pictures) is the perfect tool for dusting built Lego sets.

@kitnkaboodle that could be our house!

@toomuchlaundry I wouldn't mind, but that isn't his bedroom- it's under our stairs! As he is now a student I would have thought he would welcome getting the money for it but no ... we keep arguing/discussing about it, but there it sits ...
Out of interest, how much would a storage box full of random (but interesting!) lego sell for? I also have the aforementioned large box of minifigures - about the size of 3 shoe boxes 😳

We sorted all our Harry Potter into some eta before it went into the attic, some of it’s quite rare now seemingly.”

God I’m a bad person!
Here are our Lego storage bins.
These are the ones you want, not the ones where the mat detaches. You just pick up the edge of this mat and slide it all back in.
They’re ace.
Sorry for taking so long to come back 🤦‍♀️

The Brickit App is amazing. You take a photo of all your spread out Lego pieces and it scans the pieces and tells you what you can make, then when you choose something it shows you where in the pile of stuff each piece is!

@kitnkaboodle our lego now incorporates 2 generations of children's worth, plus DH has received some since he became an adult (and I may have a kit or two!) so we can't just blame DS.

@Hugasauras now I know what we will be doing when we are empty nesters!

I have teen and tween girls and their Lego is beyond redemption. You have to let it go. Big vessels to store it, don’t hesitate to sweep it up with a broom if need be, and unclench about the sets. They know that on cleaning lady day their current world has to be put up onto a desk, and everything else off the floor and back in the big box.

those oval IKEA laundry trugs are useful because they can see into them well.

NEVER suggest giving it away. That’s up there with suggesting people give away their pets or family members. You don’t need to reduce the amount, ever, just store it better.

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/torkis-flexi-laundry-basket-in-outdoor-blue-80339224/

That’s brilliant.

We have useful boxes stored in kallax cubes and it is sorted by colour - I did this in lockdown and it took ages 😂 it is much easier to find pieces this way but would perhaps suit an older child better. We have a mixed box that I just scoop into when I'm tidying up and then when that is full I spend an hour playing with the kids and sorting it by colour. Mini figures have their own box. Part builds are under the bed. Minecraft is in its own box as is mario. And we have a robot which is kept separately. We have lots of built projects - big Harry Potter etc on shelves. I have to dust these regularly with a feather duster - the dust drives me insane! A also have had to make my peace with it though as it brings so much joy to the kids. I have been happier since we started this system as it is easier to put away....

I hate Lego, if I stand on one more piece in the dark in the middle of the night I will lose my shit lol.

Some times I just hoover it up because I've give up 😂

FYI my post was not helpful I just felt I had to say my piece on it lol

My mother did that to me when I was little.

I saw the lumpy plastic helicopter, flicked the rotor once and went on to the next present.

We add it all to colour bins once they've inevitably destroyed their creations. This means that we can recreate any of the models pretty easily. If I was richer I'd just buy a house with space for a Lego room and organize by type of brick on a big wall of storage bins, but alas, I am poor.

IME once they've built a ready-made set into the latest model, they've little to no interest in making it again so no need to keep that set separate. Ours kept all the lego in large plastic crates and invented their own models. I don't think the instruction leaflets were ever reused at all.

We are a house of all Lego fans and have builds here and there throughout the house. I daren’t think how much it totals in purchases over the years. I do not need to know that number!

But we do keep sets separate! And there is an important element that makes this possible: any time a new set comes into our house, a container of some sort also comes with it. Not the actual cardboard Lego box because they are oversized and don’t seal. We use a mix of plastic zip bags and plain bento boxes / generic Tupperware. Set name written on the storage. Build set. Put instructions in bag. Display/play with set as long as desired. Unbuild (either in sections or completely) and place in storage option.

I will accept that my child may be the exception in wanting to rebuild sets, but this works for him because what does NOT work is him begging me to help him find the specific pieces he needs.

Also rest assured we still have a big box of mixed up Lego for free building. He will often free build with those to link seemingly unrelated sets. There is currently a version of Hogwarts in my living room that has Elsa and Anna living next door to Professor Sprout’s greenhouse, and I believe Hagrid has expanded his hut with a Minecraft scene. But all the marked storage containers are over to the side because he will play with it like this until he fancies something new and will park those away and rebuild some other set.

Annnnnd the more I try to explain this, the weirder I realise it is so I’ll just be packing up my Poundland Tupperware and making a move.

We have three children, all lego fans, DS1 was building entire large sets on his own from the age of 4 and it escalated from there. We moved house when my kids were 6, 4 and 2. I separated everything into 'genre', packed them carefully into plastic storage boxes with the left over pieces sorted by colour, people and animals, 'glass' pieces, wheels etc and DH unpacked and displayed everything when it arrived at the other end. We moved again, 4 years later - not so organised this time, we have an IKEA shelving unit that is 5x5 which has groups of models in various states of completeness on each shelf. 6 years down the line, there is lego in every room.. certain models get pride of place on book shelves (VW camper van, some Star Wars pieces and Polar exploration sets, DD who is 16 has a street of houses in her bedroom. There are kilos of mixed pieces in piles of boxes in what was the playroom and the 5x5 shelves has hundreds of part made models that have been cannibalised to make other things, then broken. I held on to the idea that I would put things back together one day, for a long long time.. and I still feel like I should.. and while I have no idea how I will get rid of it all when the day comes, I have an uncomfortable acceptance that it will never happen.

My favourite pieces are a football pitch from the 1990's with storm troopers playing against robbers being refereed by Darth Maul, a set of mini figures that DS made during lockdown to represent our family and a complex police station that was used to make a stop motion animation.

Confession time..... I'm 54 and my children are 18 and 15. Slightly Lego obsessed!!! They have their own building area (under the stairs)......mine is still in the boxes 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Slight confession here..... I'm 54, children are 18 and 15. We are obsessed!!!! My sons have their own lego area.....i keep mine in the boxes so they can't pinch any parts 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I don't see why you would want to keep LEGO separated into sets. Surely the whole point is that once you've built it once the parts join the general collection and become imagination fodder. If he later wants to rebuild old sets, he can always extract the parts again. I don't bother keeping instructions, I just download the PDFs.

I have around 20 of these sort of trays:
https://www.therange.co.uk/diy/tool-storage/organisers-cases-and-shelving/domino-tool-organiser/?position=28&s=349459#349459
They help me find the pieces I actually need for new builds, it's cheaper than ending up ordering parts from Bricklink only to discover that I actually had them after all. I have a tray for bricks, a tray for plates, a tray for slopes, a tray for clips etc. Then within the tray I break down by specific part.