The Sort

I seem to have the wrong number of bricks. 

Looking over the list of as-yet unbuilt MOCs on my personal “Bricks Cascade 2015” list, and realizing what it will all take to build them, I have far too few bricks.  (Far, far, far too few.)  On the other hand, trying to find a specific brick amongst my collection is so time consuming that I apparently have way too many. 

I think that the actual problem is that I have too few bricks in general, but too many of my bricks are unsorted.  There is, of course, a fairly obvious solution to this:  The Sorting of the Bricks.  (Yes, it’s capitalized like it’s the title of a quest film.  That’s because of the sheer scope of the undertaking.) 

Imagine a multitude of quart- and gallon-sized Ziploc bags, each packed with an unsorted conglomeration of LEGO elements.  Now imagine that those bags are overflowing from five 18 gallon plastic totes.  THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is my LEGO collection.  (This doesn’t take into account a number of still unbuilt sets that I’ve acquired over the past few years.) 

A whole lot of bricks, with absolutely no organization whatsoever.  Chaos reigns supreme. 

Previous Attempts

I’ve tried to sort my LEGO before.  Once in mid-2013, and again in early 2014. Neither time saw much success.  (And each time a sort begins, I’ve got more unsorted brick than I had at the start of the previous attempt.)  It’s been at least a year since I last tried a sort, and since then, trips to the bulk brick tables at Bricks and Minifigs, the Pick-a-Brick wall at the LEGO store, and various Bricklink orders have once again increased the size of my collection AND the resulting unsorted chaos. 

Both prior attempts took place during the run-up to a convention, with the thought that once I had all my stuff in order, I’d be able to build MOCs for display with much more efficiency.  And both times the sorting went slowly enough that I ran out of time long before it was finished.  I had to abandon sorting and just build.  “I’ll continue sorting after I get back from the convention,” I apparently lied to myself. 

But building MOCs half from the initial stages of sorted elements and half from the unsorted majority of my collection just messed up the sorted stuff.  And returning home from the con didn’t instill a strong desire to finish what little was left of what I’d started. 

The Sorting Party

If it’s true that “the third time’s the charm”, then I recently began sorting my bricks for real.  (And by ‘recently’, I mean ‘yesterday’.)  I’ve been told that the ideal way to get a start on sorting your bricks is to throw a Sorting Party.  And since both me and my LEGO stuff are spending January living in my sister’s large new house instead of my cramped (and currently very cold – brr!) basement home, I decided to throw a sorting party. 

The sorting party seemed like such an awesome idea.  Provide food and beverages, and have people come and sort my bricks. 

I announced it on the PortLUG mailing list a week or two before the event, and then talked about it at the January PortLUG meeting.  I had one confirmation, and a lot of maybes.  People suggested making it potluck so that they could bring snacks and whatnot. 

On the day of the party, my one confirmed participant showed up just like she said she would (with salad and some really delicious homemade cookies), and all the maybes stayed home.  It was a stormy day (including rain and hail), there was a playoff game on TV, and the trip from the Portland area to Salem is longer than most Portlanders want to drive. 

Looking back, I realize that I should have decided to have the party earlier than I did, so that I could have announced it earlier and given people more time to fit it into their schedules.  Or announced it even earlier still and taken suggestions on when was best in January to have it.  Live and learn. 

So it was just me and fellow PortLUG member Dorothy (and after they finished running errands, my sister and brother-in-law), and a whole lot of bricks.  And I was stunned by how much we got done.  Two to four people sorting bricks for about four hours, and we got almost halfway through the first stage of sorting.  Further into my jumbled totes of brick than I’d ever gotten in several weeks worth of working at it on my own in the past. 

Stages of Sorting

Looking into ‘sorting/organizing LEGO’ online, there are as many different methods as there are people talking about them.  But this is my plan for the project: 

Stage One:  Sorting into categories.  I’ve got a whole bunch of those clear plastic shoebox sized storage boxes, and each one represents a LEGO category.  Brick.  Plate.  Tile.  Round things (bricks, plates, tile, and disks/dishes.)  Doors and windows.  Vehicle parts.  Minifigures and accessories.  Technic.  Arches, slopes, wedges, and curvy-but-not-actually-round things.  (That one’s a weird and overflowing category.)  And so on and so forth. 

Right now I’ve sorted just over half of my totes of bags of elements into categories.  Once that happens, we move onto…

Stage Two:  Sorting into sub-categories.  Bricks’ one category becomes three.  1x? (1x1, 1x2, 1x3, 1x4, 1x6, etc.), 2x? and larger-than-2x?.  The same with plates.  Arches, slopes, wedges, and curvies goes from one box to four.  (Arches.  Slopes.  Wedges.  Curvies.)  Minifigs will be divided up into complete minifigs, minifig parts, and minifig accessories.  And again: so on and so forth. 

Stage Three:  Sorting further into sub-categories.  The 1x? categories will get sorted down with each size having its own container, as will the 2x? and the larger bricks (or plates, or tile as the case may be).  Everything will pretty much sort down to the size and shape criteria that makes the most sense. 

Stage Four:  Sorting by color.  Once I’ve got everything sorted by type of piece I’ll move onto sorting some of it by color.  (Eventually everything by color, but just the larger selections to start.) 

Stage Five:  Put everything in its new home. 

My Bricks’ New Home?

Right now, I’ve got the aforementioned shoeboxes.  Some brand new boxes of Ziploc quart and gallon bags.  A nearly infinite number of empty pill bottles.  And twenty of the old red brick tubs that strive to look like a giant 2x3 brick (courtesy of a PortLUG member who recently resorted his stuff into a better organized system than before, and brought a ton of the old red tubs to the December meeting for anyone who wanted them). 

And all of that is what is currently being used to sort.  It will also be the temporary home for the final sort until I can figure out what kind of storage system I’ll need based on the size and number of sorted categories, and the particulars of my lovely basement home. 

So somewhere down the line there will be a Storage post sequel to this Sorting post. 

Meanwhile, the first stage of the sort continues ever onward…