Getting Organized :: Lego Instruction Handbook

This summer I am doing my best to take steps to get more organized…in every area of our lives. Except cleaning. Still waiting on a house elf for that one. Some of the changes I’m making are huge, some are tiny, but in the end, they are all helping to make our lives feel a little less chaotic. I want to share my ideas with you over the summer, in the hopes that you will find inspiration for organizing, or perhaps share some organizing ideas with me in the comments section!

Lego Instruction Handbook ::

This week’s organizing project is a small one in some ways, but a HUGE one in other ways. The mess is small, but the organizing will make a huge difference in how my kids use their LEGOs. I have several Lego-fanatics living in my home. And with Lego kits come instructions. I cannot bear to throw them away, because I think that the kids may want to re-build their sets someday. So I save them. All of them. Until today they were crammed on a shelf in the basement. Like so:

Messy! Messy! Messy! I know, it shouldn’t have bothered me, because it’s tucked away in the basement, but every time I looked at this mess I itched to organize it. Though I must say, the separate kits are organized neatly into recycled deli meat containers. This is a great way to store them and keep the pieces safe! So in order to bring order to the manuals I decided to make a “Lego Handbook”. I bought a big binder and made a cute little front cover, using stickers from a cool Lego scrapbooking kit I bought on Amazon.

I gathered all of their instruction booklets together:

I stuck all of the instruction booklets in various sized page-protectors, I put the larger instruction books into 8.5×11 page protectors:

I used some of my recipe card protectors for the mid-sized instruction books:

I used baseball card protectors are perfect for the mini-instructions. I had these on hand from my coupon binder, they are also good for that too. (I’m in the midst of a coupon organizing switch though, more on that soon)

So there you have it, our new “Lego Handbook”. It’s all neat and pretty, and user-friendly. The kids can find whatever instructions they need without weeding through a huge pile. My next task is to separate the binder by category (Star Wars, Bionicle, City, etc).