As much as I love lego - its only 'made' once and then its a pile.

[bacon]

Do you know what I mean? The kits are lovely, boats, buildings, lorries etc are expensive and look fantastic however, after they have been made up they are smashed up popped into the lego box and never to be made up again - just the usual buildings, inventions etc. Is it worth buying anymore lego stuff for DS1 at 7yrs?

Agree with Indith - never sort lego by colour.

The trick is to keep them in the biggest possible boxes that still allow the kids to actually make the things that they want to. If it all gets mixed together then it becomes impossible to find the critical bits. As my boys have got older the boxes have got bigger as they are better able to find what they need.
Also the kids should be in charge of this. If they can't be arsed to keep the stuff sorted, then they don't get to make the sets properly.

Lego is great, make the kit once then break it up and release the inner architect. Dd2 thinks it is great that she could get paid to build houses!

I found sorting it by size was a nightmare! There are so may different shapes and sizes!

DH bought fishing tackle type tool box things and some smaller compartmentalized boxes and we have specialist bits in those but I was losing the will to live sorting it so took executive decision to go by colour for basic bits.

I have bought a 9 box storage unit from lidls for ds Lego - I managed to get about £350 worth for £77 from eBay - been looking all year - have castle, pirate island, police station, rescue centre literally hundreds of figures and a whole
Load of vehicles.

We jsut have a lego obsessed uncle who doesn't have kids yet. It's great, the dcs get piles and piles of the stuff every birthday and christmas. We have more duplo than we know what to do with and tonnes of lego and our eldest is only 5! I do hope he realises that when he has children chances our ours will still be playing with the lego so it won't get passed on and since we have 3 offspring we really don't have the income to give his children similar presents....ho hum.

Anyway on sorting we don't go for anal size sorting, the dcs would never cope but a box with the bricks that are 2 dots wide, a box with ones that are 1 dot wide and abox of the flat ones seems to work, it narrows it down enough that they can find the length they need easily. then a box with car related bits, one with house related bits and another with the single pieces like lights and one dot flat pieces an the other random special bricks like ones that otherwise look like a normal brick but have a hole in that you would spend hours looking for if it were in a big box.