I finally found the perfect way to store and display our growing Lego collection! Here’s how I’m organizing our Lego sets in a smaller home with no playroom.
It’s official: our entire family is Lego obsessed. Our first grader has collected so many Lego Friends sets, David and I have been doing the Lego Architecture sets during date nights, the kids have gifted me several flower sets lately, and our toddler is already very into building with Lego.
And like any family with a quickly-growing Lego collection, I realized we needed to get a handle on organizing all of these Lego sets before they take over the whole house. I researched a ton of ideas and thought through many storage and display options before I settled on the best system for our family, and now it’s ready to share with you!
If you’re looking for Lego display and storage ideas for your kids’ Lego sets, you’re in the right place! Below I’ll share my thought process and systems to consider, along with a full tour of our Lego organization system.
What’s the best way to store legos?
There are so many factors to consider before you start organizing Legos, so here are a few things to think about before you determine a system for organizing the actual pieces along with the boxes and instructions.
- If Lego sets get built over and over again, you’ll want a plan for keeping the set together in between builds. This could either involve storing fully-built sets in bins or on storage shelves, or you could decide to disassemble sets before storing them.
- If Lego sets get built once and put on display, you’ll need plenty of display space along with a plan for storing any excess sets if you run out of room.
- If Lego sets get built once and then the pieces get used to make your own creations, you may want to store the pieces by size or different colors and not worry about keeping each set separate.
- If there are certain sets that get rebuilt a lot, you may want to keep those select few organized by set and combine all the pieces from other sets to save space and allow for more free building.
- If you plan to keep the instruction manuals, you’ll need a system for storing them either with the set they belong to or all in one central spot.
- If you plan to keep the boxes each set comes in, you’ll need to decide how and where to store those.
The way you choose to store your Legos comes down to several things: how your kids (or you) play with them, how many sets you have, the type of available storage and display space you have, and how invested you are in maintaining your Lego storage system.
If you’re not prepared to keep them nicely organized, either mentally or time-wise, I’d do one of two things and call it a day: 1) get all of the loose Legos into a big bin or two and don’t worry about sorting anything, or 2) take apart completed sets and store the pieces in the original box with the manual.
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Why I Decided to Organize Our Legos By Set
Our family loves picking out new Lego sets to build and we don’t tend to do a lot of free building, it’s mostly following the instructions from Lego exactly as designed so it made the most sense to keep ours organized into sets.
The exception to this are the Lego Duplos our three year old plays with. He loves inventing new creations by mixing pieces from different sets.
I don’t expect a toddler to keep pieces neatly separated into sets, plus Duplo sets don’t have all that many pieces so it’s pretty easy to locate the pieces and rebuild them as designed if you ever wanted to. So we’re tossing all of the Duplos into one big bin and calling it a day, no sorting whatsoever. Here’s a video of our Duplo storage bin.
For the rest of us, we’ve carved out some display space around the house for our completed sets. David and I’s builds are scattered about on bookshelves and dressers, and we added some open shelving to Chloe’s room to set up her growing Lego Friends city.
Today I’m going to share some ideas for displaying your Lego sets as well the system that’s working well for storing our disassembled sets.
Ideas For Displaying Lego Sets
Most of us don’t have room to display every single set we build, but ideally you’ll have some space to display some of the favorite sets. We often think about Lego displays in kids’ rooms, but a lot of adult Lego sets can double as pretty decor, too!
Why Displaying LEGO Sets Can Be a Great Option
Once you finish building a Lego set, you tend to feel really proud of it and want to enjoy it for a while which is why it’s nice to have a place to display them. This gives you a chance to enjoy your creation and share it with others.
Lego sets come in so many cool themes and characters, and can be a great way to show off your personality. Displaying your completed sets turns them into fun decor for bedrooms, playrooms, even living spaces.
From an organizing standpoint, a great perk of displaying completed sets is that it keeps all of the pieces together so you don’t have loose pieces to keep track of. And you might as well display the sets where you can enjoy them instead of them being packed away in storage.
Easy Ways for Displaying LEGO Sets
The good news about displaying Lego sets is that you do NOT need a fancy system. You can set up really simple display space in bedrooms, carve out a little space on bookshelves, and more very easily.
Wall Shelves
Adding a few shelves to an empty wall is a simple way to display Lego sets without taking up floor space. Look around your room and I bet you can carve out a little spot for a shelf or two!
- Floating shelves
- Picture ledges
- Display shelves
- Shelf brackets with a simple board on top (what we did in the photos below)
- A shadowbox for minifigs
Bookshelves or Cube Storage
Any bookshelf can be used for displaying Lego sets. When our daughter ran out of shelf space for her sets, we dusted off an old bookcase we’d had in storage, moved it into her room, and instantly created a ton more space for Legos along with books and all of the other treasures kids tend to collect.
Freestanding bookshelves will usually have deeper shelf space than your wall shelves, which works well for displaying your larger builds and sets that go together, like arranging a whole village of Lego Friends or Lego City sets next to each other.
Bookshelves can also give you display space lower to the floor for those young kids who love to rearrange their sets but can’t reach higher shelves.
The challenge with bigger bookshelves and cube shelves is that smaller sets can get lost toward the back of those deep shelves. To solve this, think about adding something to give the sets in the back some height so they can still be seen when other sets are displayed in front of them.
Here are some ideas that you can use to give your Lego sets some height on large shelves:
- A stack of books
- Tiered organizers for pantries
- Kitchen shelf risers
- Display risers
- Decorative boxes
- Decorative pedestals and risers (often used for plants and decorative objects)
- Clear storage bins
- Small wooden crates
- Stacks of scrap wood
Tops of Desks, Dressers, Console Tables
Look around your room for existing surfaces that could serve as Lego display space. You could store Lego sets on top of dressers, on the corner of your desk, on a console table in the family room, and more.
This space could be the perfect spot to rotate in your current favorite sets or most recent builds. And the perk with this idea is that you are using existing furniture so you don’t need to add anything new.
Inside Glass Cabinets
Utilize the display space inside storage cabinets and hutches with glass doors. This protects them from dust while keeping them visible, and can be especially great for displaying collectible builds and decorative sets in a living space.
Tips for Displaying LEGO Sets with Kids
- Rotate sets every few months
- Only display the very favorite builds
- Use higher shelves for fragile sets
- Keep bins nearby for sets that eventually get taken apart
Organizing Your Kids’ Lego Sets in Between Builds
If you’ve decided that storing disassembled Legos by set makes the most sense for your family, here’s what I recommend doing. Megan from thehomesihavemade.com inspired this whole system FYI – her blog is a gold mine of organizing ideas!
Step 1: Round Up all Legos, Boxes & Manuals
Go around your house and gather everything Lego: the half-built sets, the unopened sets, the stray instruction books, the plastic baggie of extra pieces, any empty boxes you’ve saved, etc.
I’d say the only exception to this are completed sets that are currently on display – if you know they have all the pieces and you want to continue displaying them, you can let them be.
Step 2: Sort Lego Pieces Into Sets
The sorting process could be fairly quick or it could be a monstrous undertaking depending on the current state of your Legos and how many sets you own.
For us, we’re fairly new to building Legos so our collection was pretty manageable and mostly organized into sets already – either fully built or taken apart and put in baggies. The instruction manuals however were stashed all over the place so it took me a bit to locate all of those.
If you’re a big Lego family and you have bins and bins of loose Lego pieces to sort, this step may take quite a while and can be quite tedious. So just a fair warning you may want to enlist some help or have a bingeable show playing in the background while you sort.
Then move on to sets that have been completely taken apart. Use the inventory list inside the manual to gather all of the Lego bricks you need – the inventory list will note all of the brick sizes and colors as well as the number of each item. Small bowls or bins are helpful to use while sorting small parts, and plastic bags are your friend for keeping pieces together.
If you are missing any Lego manuals, you can search for pdfs of manuals on lego.com.
Note: You could, of course, put the sets in storage fully assembled. But this requires fairly large bins and would take a lot more storage space. So I’m choosing to dismantle our sets and store the loose bricks with the manual, rather than trying to find bins to fit every fully-built Lego set. This is a better option if you have a small space.
Step 3: Organize Each set into a durable clear bin with a latching lid
First, let’s address this question: Do you keep the original Lego boxes?
As our family started accumulating Lego sets, one of my big questions was if we should keep the boxes or not. After much debate, I decided all of the original boxes would be recycled after the set is built.
My main reasoning is that Lego boxes come in so many different shapes and sizes that they aren’t really designed to stack nicely on a shelf. The boxes are also larger than necessary so there’s wasted space. Plus the boxes aren’t made to be sealed up so unless you tape them shut really well, you’ll risk pieces falling out.
The main reason I came up with for keeping the boxes is for resale. If you’re planning to build Lego sets once and then sell them, I’ve noticed that complete sets with the original boxes and manuals tend to sell faster and possibly for a little higher price on Facebook Marketplace but it seems like complete sets with manuals will also sell fine without their original boxes.
I view Legos as one of those toys that last a lifetime and we don’t really have intentions of selling our sets any time soon. Plus, our kids are nearly four years apart so I want to hold onto sets that our youngest may want to build a few years after his older sister. So for me, it doesn’t seem worth it to hold onto a bunch of cardboard boxes.
Instead of bulky cardboard boxes, I highly recommend investing in durable containers for long term Lego storage. Something that’s stackable, has a lid that latches shut, and comes in a few sizes will be best.
With those criteria in mind, I went with these Sterilite plastic containers for Lego set storage. The smaller bins worked great for our smaller Lego sets and the large sizes were a great solution for our large adult sets.
I’ll link to the exact sizes I used as shown in these photos:
Simply fill your clear plastic bins with all of the bricks for one set, add in the Lego instruction manuals, latch the lid, and you have a great way to easily organize Lego sets!
StEP 4: Add A Label
It’s also helpful to add labels to the bins. You can make labels in a lot of different ways, but I think it’s best to include a photo of the set. This helps kids that can’t read yet, but it also makes it easier for everyone to identify the sets at a glance.
Option 1: Cut out a picture from the box and tape that onto the container to serve as your label. This is the easiest route, though you likely won’t have a picture small enough to display on the short sides of the box which is important if you want to identify sets when your containers are stacked up.
Option 2: Place the instruction manual on top of the legos inside the container so you can see the manual cover through the clear lid. This doesn’t allow you to see an image of the set from the side when your containers are stacked up, but at least gives you a simple way to show an image of the set on top.
Option 3: Design a quick label in Canva (find images of your sets on lego.com), print it out, and attach it to your container using packing tape. Megan has a great Canva template for lego labels that you can use. This takes a little time to do, but is fairly easy to whip up new ones as you accumulate more sets. Plus, packing tape is easily removable if/when needed.
Step 5: Store Your Bins On A Shelf or in a Cabinet
The final step is to designate a storage spot for your Lego bins. These stack really nicely on a bookshelf or inside a storage cabinet or built-in cabinets. Find a space that works for your family and stack your new bins inside!
Keep in mind that having easy access to your Lego collection makes it more likely your family will continue to rebuild the Lego sets, so ideally your storage space is somewhere in a play area, bedroom or living space where your kids can easily get to them.
All of our kid Lego sets are currently being stored in one of the built-in cabinets by the fireplace in our living room. And then I have a couple of bins with adult sets on a bookshelf in our unfinished basement, which is also where we store our adult board games.
I hope this Lego storage idea is helpful to you! I know there are tons of ways to store Legos and lots of different scenarios, so I’d love a message from you on Instagram letting me know if you try this system or if you have another Lego storage dilemma I could possibly address in future content.
Looking for more toy organizing ideas? Take a look at these blog posts:
- Small Toy Organizers
- Using A Hanging Door Organizer For Stuffed Animal Storage
- Organizing Our Play Kitchen & Play Food
- Organizing Kids’ Art Supplies – Tour Our Craft Cabinet!
Have a fantastic day!
