≡ Menu

How to sort & store 250,000 LEGO pieces

Architect Jeffrey Pelletier has amassed a collection of a quarter of a million LEGO pieces in the basement of his family’s 1902 Seattle home. He completely remodeled this old house, including the basement that now serves as a LEGO room and media room. A great place for Jeffrey to work on his architectural models and to play with his kids. I love seeing LEGO spaces like this! So serene and peaceful, yet so inviting for creativity! 🙂

LEGO Room by Jeffrey Pelletier

The 250,000 LEGO pieces are organized in 153 IKEA bins and 189 Sterilite drawers in a custom-built shelving-system that is placed around the room. This allows floor-to-ceiling organization and leaves plenty of open space in the middle for building. Watch the video to see how Jeffrey organizes all those gold bricks, yellow heads, countless gears and more.

Even if you don’t have this amount of LEGO, or a dedicated LEGO room right now, it is a good idea keep whatever you have organized. This allows you to display your masterpieces nicely, and also to find all the pieces you need when you are building. Various binds and drawers are readily available at department stores, and they are not very expensive. If you don’t want to drive around looking for bins, you can also take advantage of Amazon, which has a large selection of storage solution for LEGO fans, including the Sterilite drawers featured in the video. Below are some links where you can find them:

So what do you think? How do you like this LEGO room? And what kind of storage and display system are you using for LEGO? Feel free to share your own solutions in the comment section below! 😉

You might also like to check out the Care & Feed of LEGO section for more storage and display ideas or select from the following related posts:

{ 17 comments… add one }
  • Benjamin Streets May 5, 2015, 11:51 AM

    I am sooooo jealous!

    • admin May 5, 2015, 12:06 PM

      LOL! Yeah! Me too! :mrgreen:

    • Ninja of Stealth May 7, 2015, 2:02 PM

      I’m going to have one of those in my house someday. Just picture I,! take in the moment. a whole room, full of LEGO bricks.

  • Kim May 5, 2015, 2:50 PM

    I wish I had that kind of space, it’s amazing. I currently have everything sorted by piece in plastic ziploc bags and sorted by type, but there’s some super random stuff that just doesn’t have a type. But I’m getting there. I just have limited space. I really like the Acro Mills storage units thought, the are a good price and seemingly a better price than the ones I got, the Stack on ones, which I don’t believe are featured here.

    • admin May 5, 2015, 4:10 PM

      Kim, I use StackOn drawer cabinets myself and I’m very happy with them. They are great for a medium-size collection. However once you have pieces in the hundreds of thousands, the next upgrade would be to larger drawers like the ones featured here because you would have hundreds of each piece that would not fit in the small drawers.

      If you considering growing your collection it might be worth going with the larger drawers from the very beginning and just divide parts in them in ziplock bags. This way you don’t have to upgrade to a different storage system later. Personally I’m not planning to expand my loose LEGO collection that much, nor do I have the space for it, so I will stay with the smaller drawer units.

      But yeah, if we ever move house, I would love to have a LEGO room like this! 😛

      • Kim May 5, 2015, 5:08 PM

        Yeah, didn’t mean to imply that the Stack On’s weren’t good, just the sizes available didn’t seem to easily accommodate what I had. I still need to determine who much storage I need by compiling my old sets. I’ve been bad at making sure I build the old ones before buying a ton of new stuff. Part of that is the sorting problem though, making it hard to find the parts to put together the old sets if they’re not properly organized. I don’t know how much purposeful parts expansion I’ll do but if I come across great deals on collections or loose brick or happen to want an abundance off the pick a brick wall, my spare parts will expand.

        • admin May 5, 2015, 5:13 PM

          Yeah, this is a problem for all LEGO fans, especially when your collection keeps expanding. But I guess it’s a good problem to have too much LEGO. 😉

          • David Tennant Lover May 5, 2015, 8:21 PM

            I use the Stack On’s also to store my Legos. I agree with you that it’s some times not the best (but it still really helps). Most of my Lego pieces are stored in the Stack On’s. The themes I split it into were Big Pieces, Small Pieces, Weapons/Animals, Plants (Nature), Figures, and more. They are useful for now, I want to eventually have, possibly, shelves and drawers with more Legos. It’s just a little to small! 😛

  • David Tennant Lover May 5, 2015, 8:16 PM

    This looks really cool! Makes me want to remodel my house with Legos.. 😛

  • floridabrick May 6, 2015, 1:22 AM

    Admin – after more than 6 months I can finally let the air out. (I’ve been holding my breath for this) Yesterday Lego updated a bunch of Exclusives and moved them to the “Retired Product” section, including Town Hall, Haunted House, and Grand Emporium. I told you they would just quietly make them go away at a date in the future with no significance (…rather than follow any kind of logical protocol, for instance utilizing their Retiring Soon section, or anything other than just leaving them as Sold Out for an eternity after they’ve been long gone.)

    I’m sure I wasn’t subconsciously hoping they would instead be changed to Available Now…

    • admin May 6, 2015, 10:21 AM

      Yeah, they seem to be doing that with exclusives. And, no there was no chance of them coming back… unfortunately…

  • floridabrick May 6, 2015, 10:48 AM

    Hence the frustration.

    • admin May 6, 2015, 10:51 AM

      I know, it is frustrating for sure. This is why it’s best to get exclusives when they get released, or shortly after. Within a 1-year window after the original release should be safe. (Except for the Ideas sets which could be sold out much faster).

  • Clumsybumsy June 25, 2015, 3:47 PM

    This looks like a lot of effort. I started resorting my now roughly 50,000 brick collection and I am going to move on an Akro-Mill like system as well. They are handy but don’t fit my storage space though. Therefore I am going to experiment with a DIY 4-layer drawer for the IKEA Kallax closets. I will divide each drawer into 16 small squares then. Let’s hope that works for the time being because buidling sure is better than sorting.

    • admin June 25, 2015, 5:56 PM

      Sounds like a reasonable plan. Keep us posted on how it goes! 😀

  • BricksNThings December 21, 2015, 11:24 AM

    I’m so jelly.

    • admin December 21, 2015, 2:24 PM

      Yeah, who wouldn’t be? 🙄

Cancel reply

Leave a Comment