The best sorting system uses whatever you have on hand… even if you only have peanut butter jars.

Let’s start with the big question: what’s the point of sorting LEGO? Well, for me, the point of sorting is to find your pieces when you want them.

Why did I bother to start with such an obvious fact? Because sometimes it’s easy to forget that a good sorting system isn’t about having one container for every single type of brick—a good sorting system isn’t about how organized your mom thinks your collection is—a good sorting system isn’t about how easily another LEGO fan could find out where you keep your pink cheese slopes. A good sorting system is one where you can find exactly what you want to build with the least amount of hassle.

Sorting is very subjective. I have two siblings who build LEGO (actually kind of two and a half—it’s complicated) and I’m amazed by how our sorting systems match our building styles. It’s a mutual give and take—the way you sort will inform how easy or how hard it is for you to get to certain pieces, which will inform how frequently or infrequently you use those pieces in your creations, which informs how you sort them. Let’s face it, I bury my wheels. I practically never even think about using wheels except for those one or two times I’ve built a car. But that was part of the reason I buried them—I don’t think about them—I don’t want to use them.

I sort to build and I build at this desk. Enjoy the early preview of one of my next MOCs!

The level of sub-categorization you make use of in your sorting both reflects and inspires your building style as well. One of my brothers sorts kind of the way a backhoe might sort LEGO. He has containers of mostly a certain color—but a few other pieces sneak in there. When he builds, he throws random pieces in at random places, making for interesting texture, intriguing part uses, and loads of tiny details.

My other brother sorts down to the minutiae. No finding random pieces in the wrong bucket for him (well, except for the bags of bricks he hopes to sort someday…). He plans his builds out, looks for the piece he needs, finds it, and uses it. He builds more like an architect with a blueprint and a plan, not a creative stew where things just happen.

Just like your building style, the way you sort is a reflection of your personality. So, that said, welcome to my LEGO collection, the place where all this came from! Let me show you around.

Sort of Sorting by Color

My most basic unit of sorting is color. Multi-colored containers are the exception for specialized pieces (such as bars, clips, profile bricks, and so forth).

The first home for a color is a peanut butter jar (there was a time when I used yogurt cups so… peanut butter jars are not that bad). To the left of my desk, on top of a long low narrow table, is a lovely row of peanut butter jars filled with rare colors like sand blue and light yellow.

For me, seeing an element or color can inspire a build—plus the best sorting system uses whatever you have on hand… even if you only have peanut butter jars.

When a color overflows its peanut butter jar, then it’s time to make a judgement call. Usually, it’s the plates or bricks that are making it overflow. So I sort those out; the plates go into reusable ice cream cartons (this is what an ice cream cartons look like in Chile) on the near side of my long table:

I have one column of plastic drawers to the right of my desk for bricks, which probably looks the most like sorting systems you’ve seen from other people.

There aren’t quite enough drawers in the column though, so there are a few ice cream cartons of bricks on top of the drawer stack. I use empty ones on top to keep dust off. Empty peanut butter jars live in the box for the LEGO Ideas Pop-Up Book to the side.

So, first division: color. Second division: plates (on my near left), bricks (right), and everything else (far left).

The next big thing I like to pull out is slopes and wedge plates. Two of my left-hand desk drawers are dedicated to peanut butter jars full of slopes. Here we have some subdivisions: usually the first division is one jar of curves vs. one jar of straight slopes, then sometimes the wedge plates need a jar of their own.

I have so many red, black, and white slopes that some of them have moved to ice cream cartons on the bottom layer of the table. This means I have to actually get up out of my chair while building when I want one of those… I miss the good old days when my entire collection fit handily in my desk! (That’s totally sarcastic, I couldn’t build a 20x20 custom model without running out of pieces back then!)

Subdividing by Element

Another important division is tiles. Tiles have their own subcategories: small tiles in the tops of peanut butter jars (gotta use the whole jar!), and larger tiles in the jars themselves. What counts as a small tile, you ask? Well, that frankly depends on how many I have. All my teal macaroni tiles don’t fit into the top of a peanut butter jar, so they graduated to the large tile category. But I only have one coral macaroni tile, so it stays in the small category. Rule of thumb: put it wherever you can retreive it again most easily!

Small tiles are kept in the handiest possible location: a long narrow drawer across the middle of my desk. This is actually a relatively new arrangement, ever since LEGO Dots came in and my small tile collection exploded.

One completely empty jar top… someone is borrowing all my reddish brown 1x2 tiles!

Large tiles have a drawer to themselves (mostly) on the bottom left of the desk. In some cases—like black, white, and greys—I have enough tiles to justify an entire jar for one color. In other cases—blues, yellows, reds—it makes more sense to combine the tiles. In the case of brown, I have so many tiles that I have to keep the 1x4s in their own container—which does not fit in my tile drawer! But right now that problem is being solved by my brother who borrowed all of them.

Next—a drawer of SNOT bricks on the other side of my desk! I have a similar arrangement for these as for my tiles, with the difference being that I completely separate brackets from bricks. Bricks in one row (left), brackets in the next two.

The exception here is light grey SNOT bricks, which easily fill an ice cream carton of their own and so have been banished from the SNOT drawer. We’ll get to those in a bit.

Now let’s take a look at those small top drawers on the left and right. The left-hand drawer is full of clips and bar connections. These are divided by color—the general difference is bright colors vs. bland colors (white sometimes thinks of itself as bright and sometimes as bland). And I have so many larger bland colored clips (and bar attachments) that they moved into two peanut butter jars over on that long table.

Bones and Bits

The right-hand drawer is full of random things I want to have handy—bones, flags, teeth, hoses, wings, telescopes, 1x1 round plates with hollow studs, you name it.

While we’re here, let’s take another look at that center drawer. Besides the rows and rows of tiles, I keep tablescraps and assembled minifigures in here. It keeps them out of the way—and out of the dust—without burying them somewhere out of sight where I’ll forget them just when I need them.

So many random figs and tablescraps… a great place to get inspired for the next build!

Gone Fishin’

Now it’s time to take a look at what probably caught your attention first—that fishing tackle-esque box that is permanently established on the right-hand side of my desk. It’s got 1x1 plates, 1x2 plates, and cheese slopes on one side, and jumpers, bars, 1x1 round bricks, and a few other handy things on the other. This is almost all my 1x1 plates but not quite, because I decided to sort my light yellow 1x1 plates into my light yellow container; I use them most in that connection.

And it’s not anything like all my cheese slopes; just the rarer colors. It used to be all my 1x2 plates (except light yellow again), but those overflowed and have now moved into peanut butter jars on my long table—except for a few rarer colors which are sticking it out next to the cheese slopes.

All right, we’ve covered my desk except for that giant drawer on the bottom right. This houses baseplates, instruction booklets, sticker sheets, bags of broken pieces, extra torsos and legs I never use (outside of Iron Forge), and my light grey SNOT bricks.

Hidden Down Under

So I guess now it’s time to look under my desk. Welcome to my small collection of Pick-a-Brick (PaB) cups! You can probably tell I’m not a Technic builder by the unsophisticated way I sort my Technic pieces. Axles, pins, gears, bigger pieces, and even bigger pieces are placed where they are accessible, but maybe not in the most convenient of locations.

Also you can see another large PaB cup with all kinds of random large prefab parts. Plus one big cup for windows, another small cup for brown windows, a cup full of black cones, one cup for rowboats and motorcycles and things like that, and last but not least a cup for crates and barrels.

When people with long legs build at my desk they sometimes kick these.

Now for underneath my table. In the far corner where they’re super hard to reach are all my wheels. Thrown about on top of this are three containers; printed and stickered pieces, constraction joints, and 2x2 round bricks.

In the background, those are boxes full of random white, grey, black, brown, and red pieces. It takes a bit of effort to dig these out but I don’t use them very often.

In the front we have rows of peanut butter jar tops and plastic baggies with 1x1 round plates. A few peanut butter jars too, for larger quantities. Then there are two stacks of ice cream cartons; plant pieces, and dark grey plates which don’t fit on the top of the table with the rest of my plate collection.

Around back are the slopes that don’t fit into my slope drawers, along with things like the black 3x4 collectible minifigure platforms on the bottom because I never use them.

Transparent Pieces and That One Bin No One Talks About

We’re almost to the minifigure pieces but I have to explain just one thing more—transparent parts. Trans-clear finds a home down in the bottom left-hand desk drawer with my tiles, but other colors hang out at the very back of my table, on top of the LEGO Ideas Saturn V box (empty of course!). Here too, you’ll find my one jelly bean jar, full of windscreens. (You can’t live on just peanut butter and ice cream!)

Last and probably least, under my bed is a large bucket full of massive prefab parts which I occasionally use as filler brick but rarely as anything else.

At the very beginning of my collection all my bricks were in a bucket like this!

Minifigures

And now for minifigure parts! Sorting minifigures is an art of its own. I have three fishing tackle boxes, one LEGO Dots “bento box” sorting tray, and a perpetually open pencil box for my heads. And there’s also that red LEGO cube (yay for siblings who buy you LEGO-themed presents!) which is home to most of my animals, although a couple of animals don’t fit and have to fend for themselves outside.

We’ll start at the top and move down. Hats and hair find a home in this Dots container. Hairs arranged by color around the outside, hats in the middle.

This reminds me that I actually have another peanut butter jar full of hats I never use. That and a container of heads-I-never-use (mostly repeats and faded heads) are buried back by my wheels.

Keeping my heads organized used to be a perpetual struggle. I stacked them and then dropped the stacks into a peanut butter jar like so, kind of like a bouquet of odd flowers.

But the stacks frequently broke, and then I’d be in a hurry and drop loose heads inside and it always ended up as a mess. I had to resort my heads every month, so I’m happy to have finally found a better solution!

This case is perfect for me since I can now see all the heads at a glance. I stack heads more or less by expression (happy vs. otherwise)—also by “age” and by whether or not they have facial hair. One half of the container is male heads, the other half female. I bet you can tell at a glance which half is which! LEGO really needs to step up their game on female minifigure heads! (Also I just noticed this looks an awful lot like that minifigure head puzzle!)

Now for torsos. I divide these mostly by time period. The rule is, if I use them together, they get to enjoy the same container together.

A few spare hands in front for easy switching. It is very handy!

I try to keep arms and hands in my torsos—it usually saves time. But I have taken the arms and hands out of all the torsos-I-never-use-except-for-Iron-Forge, and have a few small containers for my loose arms and hands.

Legs are a little harder to sort. Printing vs. no printing, obviously—but how to divide printed legs is a little trickier. I sometimes have trouble remembering which container a given pair of legs is in. Mostly, I divide them by how versatile they are; legs that basically have to go with a very specific torso are in one container, legs that have a little continued printing but not much are in another, and legs that are basically just pants on their own go into the middle container.

Time to Accessorize!

I’ve saved my favorite box of all for last—a tackle box full of minifigure accessories. The bottom row houses food, useful pieces, not so useful pieces, sporting gear, useful weapons, and not so useful weapons. And then the middle row has small neck-pieces and feathers, printed or stickered accessories, and customs. The very top row has large neck-pieces (and probably a few tails), and then gold and jewels and transparent accessories. And on top of it all, a small plastic bag with capes.

Sort to Build

So there you have the tour of my LEGO collection. Probably in another ten years it’ll look totally different and you’ll need another tour. Since I try to be as practical as I can with my sorting, occasionally I find a new technique that makes me sort in a different way. And then, of course, my collection is always expanding, so containers are always overflowing!

Not to show off my Latin, but there’s a saying Iglesia Reformata semper Reformanda (spelling subject to error); and just like that, a sorted LEGO collection is always being re-sorted. So maybe this will inspire you to go take a look at your own collection and see if you’ve under-sorted or over-sorted something. My advice is to keep your sorting method as practical and simple as you can—and don’t forget, no matter how beautifully sorted your collection, the important thing is that you build with it!

How do you sort and store the piece you build with? And how does Geneva eat so much ice cream and peanut butter!? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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