This summer I am doing my best to take steps to get more organized...in every area of our lives. Except cleaning. Still waiting on a house elf for that one. Some of the changes I'm making are huge, some are tiny, but in the end, they are all helping to make our lives feel a little less chaotic. I want to share my ideas with you over the summer, in the hopes that you will find inspiration for organizing, or perhaps share some organizing ideas with me in the comments section! This week's organizing project is a small one. I have several Lego-fanatics living in my home. And with Lego kits come instructions. I cannot bear to throw them away, because I think that the kids may want to re-build their sets someday. So I save them. All of them. Until today they were crammed on a shelf in the basement.
Messy. Messy. Messy. I know, it shouldn't have bothered me, because it's tucked away in the basement, but every time I looked at this mess I itched to organize it. Though I must say, the seperate kits are organized neatly into recycled deli meat containers. This is a great way to store them and keep the pieces safe! So in order to bring order to the manuals I decided to make a "Lego Handbook".
I bought a big binder and made a cute little front cover, using stickers from a cool Lego scrapbooking kit I bought on Amazon. I gathered all of their instructions together:
And I stuck them all in various sized page-protectors.
I put the larger instructions into 8.5x11 plastic page protectors
I used some of my recipe card protectors for the mid-sized instruction books.
I used baseball card protectors are perfect for the mini-instructions. I had these on hand from my coupon binder, they are also good for that too. I'm in the midst of a coupon organizing switch though, more on that soon ;)
So there you have it, our new "Lego Handbook". It's all neat and pretty, and user-friendly. The kids can find whatever instructions they need without weeding through a huge pile. My next task is to seperate the binder by category (Star Wars, Bionicle, City, etc).
And my shelf looks better too. (forgive poor photo quality, I'm in my dark and gloomy basement closet)
What are your secrets tips for keeping your kids Legos, or any other toys, organized?
4 comments:
Stopped by from over at Org. Junkie. Legos... yeah... we have a ton... we call my youngest son "The Lego King". The last time I helped him...*ahem*... organize his room, I made up a binder like this for his Lego Booklets.
Organizing his legos? We've tried drawers, bins, sorting by color, under the bed bins, sectioning off a small corner of his room. The only thing that has seemed to work is a plastic swimming pool. We put his bed on risers so that the pool can slide under it. THAT has been the best solution.
Good luck as your collection grows!!
The swimming pool is a great idea! I have thought about switching the train table into a lego work table, it's a great table, has two drawers, and space underneath for bins to slide under. But I haven't been able to make the switch because my two youngest boys still play cars/trains on the table. So right now our legos are living in assorted sized bins.
I use a binder and page protectors for my Lego obsessed son's manuals too. We started a new similar binder for the Lego club magazines that he 'meditates' over!! I tried separating his Lego pieces but to no avail. His bed has drawers underneath so we have dedicated one drawer just for Lego pieces. He usually does his own thing with the pieces after creating and then breaking down a new set. He seems content to rummage through the entire drawer of misc. Lego pieces to find that one particular part!! But he knows theyre all in one place. It's great also for easy cleanup- just dump them all back in the drawer- no thinking required!
I've been looking everywhere for something to hold the half-sized sheet manuals, recipe holders!!! OF COURSE. Thanks!
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