Do you have kids who love Lego's? Do you have roughly 10,000 of them laying around your house in various areas, and you step on them in the middle of the night? Do you spend hours a week looking for "that one part" that Junior just has to have right now?
If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, you need to read on.
Anyway, other than the blocks being on the floor (for which there is really no cure other than to train your kids well), the other hassle is the question, "Mommy, can you find me some fire? I really need some fire for this <insert destructive device here>." (Remember, my boys are just five and seven years old, so "finding things on their own" lasts about five minutes.) Now the fun begins.
We were keeping all the Lego's in a giant box. It's actually one of those fold-able cubes. So, how do you look for a smallish piece when you need it? You dump out all 10,000 pieces and sift through them. Sometimes it would take hours of searching. You can't just pick up handfuls and dump them back in the box; you have to sift through each handful. Tedious and boring, not to mention aggravating for the kids trying to patiently wait for the coveted block.
So I did some searching. I didn't want to organize the blocks by colour, or snap them on top of each other, but I wanted to organize them somehow. Size seemed like the reasonable approach, but how to do it? Compartmentalized storage is easy to come by; I could use tackle boxes or sewing boxes or little tool boxes or whatever. But nothing really appealed to me.
Until I started searching on the Internet and came across Box 4 Blox. It looked a little cheesy, but I thought it was perfect. It's an inter-locking stack of boxes with smaller and smaller holes in them on the bottom, so the Lego blocks use gravity to sift through. The smallest pieces end up on the bottom, and the larger pieces stay on the top. I ordered two sets of them and they arrived in short order.
We've been using the Box 4 Blox or a little over a month now. I am so happy I bought these! It's rare that the boys call me for help to sift through the blocks anymore. They just take the boxes apart and look for the piece themselves. Everyone is much happier and I don't spend hours looking for that one special pieces.
The box sets are just under $30 but in my opinion they are worth every penny. I need to get two more boxes, but I'm actually waiting until after Christmas because ultimately I might need about three. The site claims the boxes hold roughly 1,500 pieces, but I'm pretty sure I got more than that in there. I did leave the "giant" pieces out though.
The owners are located in New Zealand and email you a few times to keep you posted on when the boxes have shipped, when they should be there, etc. I like that personal touch, as I am a small business owner myself. I'm really big on customer service and they certainly provided that (even though I didn't need it for any problems). Despite them being a world away from me, the boxes shipped from within the US and I actually received them in about a week.
If you need to organize your Lego's, this is a great solution to your problem. Of course, I haven't figured out how to get the pieces to put themselves in there, but at least I don't have to individually place each tiny Lego blog into a specific section; I can just shake the box and they all go quite nicely to their intended home.
