I make no secret of the fact that I like playing with Legos. I don't break them out all that often, but I do have some lying around the house. It lets me tinker and be creative, and I just like plain like building stuff. As I mentioned in that previous post, I keep a bucket of Legos in my room.
Well, technically, I keep two buckets of Legos in my room. One is red and the other is pink. I don't quite remember getting the red bucket, but it was full of your standard pieces. It had the 2 by 2 squares, the 2 by 4 bricks, and some 1 by 2 edge pieces. It wasn't fancy, but my siblings and I had plenty of fun building planes, houses, and space ship looking things with them. Somewhere along the line, though, my parents bought a house-themed set, and that one came in the pink bucket. I'm assuming it was meant for my sister, what with the color scheme, but all of the pieces ultimately ended up mixed together. So I have an amalgamation of pieces all thrown together in these two buckets.
The problem
That's all well and good, but over the years, the lid to the red bucket was lost. That meant that I had two buckets, but only one lid. Remember, I am the same person who worries about how cleanly I tore the page from a calendar or whether I've been spelling something incorrectly for years. Suffice it to say, I worry about things being orderly, and I try to keep things organized as much as possible. The fact that I had a mismatched number of buckets and lids always bugged me a little bit. Luckily, there weren't enough pieces to fill both buckets, so I could mostly solve this problem by leaving one half full, and then stacking the other bucket on top of it. In essence, the second bucket became the "lid" for the half full bucket on the bottom.
This wasn't a perfect solution, but given what I had to work with, it did the trick. However, the eagle eyed among you may have noticed that I used the past tense in that last sentence. Yes, that was my solution. I now have a new solution. And it all started when I spotted this guy at a store:
You see, that guy stores Legos. It's got a pretty hefty size, too, so I could fit quite a few Legos in there. In short, I could replace the half-filled bucket without a lid with a brand new container. The fact that he made me chuckle a little bit didn't hurt, either. So, I immediately set about putting him to use. In fact, I got home at 11 one night, and immediately started transferring Legos so that I could take advantage of my new toy storage unit.
What I hadn't realized, though, was that this particular storage unit was also supposed to help sort your Legos. Well, hell, this I had to see. Inside the container, there are several sieves of different sizes. The idea is that you throw a bunch of pieces in the top, and shake the whole container a little bit. The smaller pieces fall through the holes, and the larger pieces stay on top. If you do this with a couple of layers, you can more or less sort your pieces with nothing more than gravity.
Well, me being me, I had to try this out. It seemed like a clever solution, and I like clever solutions. So, at some point near midnight, I was sitting in my living room, shaking a container full of Legos. The system more or less worked, though I realized that a lot of the pieces I had were clogging up the holes. Once I removed some of them, I got some better results. It wasn't perfect, but it helped.
Well, technically, I keep two buckets of Legos in my room. One is red and the other is pink. I don't quite remember getting the red bucket, but it was full of your standard pieces. It had the 2 by 2 squares, the 2 by 4 bricks, and some 1 by 2 edge pieces. It wasn't fancy, but my siblings and I had plenty of fun building planes, houses, and space ship looking things with them. Somewhere along the line, though, my parents bought a house-themed set, and that one came in the pink bucket. I'm assuming it was meant for my sister, what with the color scheme, but all of the pieces ultimately ended up mixed together. So I have an amalgamation of pieces all thrown together in these two buckets.
The problem
That's all well and good, but over the years, the lid to the red bucket was lost. That meant that I had two buckets, but only one lid. Remember, I am the same person who worries about how cleanly I tore the page from a calendar or whether I've been spelling something incorrectly for years. Suffice it to say, I worry about things being orderly, and I try to keep things organized as much as possible. The fact that I had a mismatched number of buckets and lids always bugged me a little bit. Luckily, there weren't enough pieces to fill both buckets, so I could mostly solve this problem by leaving one half full, and then stacking the other bucket on top of it. In essence, the second bucket became the "lid" for the half full bucket on the bottom.
This wasn't a perfect solution, but given what I had to work with, it did the trick. However, the eagle eyed among you may have noticed that I used the past tense in that last sentence. Yes, that was my solution. I now have a new solution. And it all started when I spotted this guy at a store:
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| The face of salvation |
What I hadn't realized, though, was that this particular storage unit was also supposed to help sort your Legos. Well, hell, this I had to see. Inside the container, there are several sieves of different sizes. The idea is that you throw a bunch of pieces in the top, and shake the whole container a little bit. The smaller pieces fall through the holes, and the larger pieces stay on top. If you do this with a couple of layers, you can more or less sort your pieces with nothing more than gravity.
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| Sieves in action |
So not only do I have a new storage system now, but I have one that helps keep similar pieces together. You have no idea how useful this can be. Easily a third of my time playing with Legos has been spent looking for a particular piece. And it always seems like you can never find that piece when you need it. But with this, I have a fighting chance to cut that number down. This is exciting stuff.
With all that said, allow me to present to you my brand new Lego storage system.
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| He's not he only one smiling about this |
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