Lego Disaster Solutions

I have a Lego disaster at my house right now. It is quickly being solved so I decided to share my Lego solutions. You can read "I Hate Legos" to see exactly what brought me to this Lego solutions article.

We have seven different Lego sets all with a gazillion pieces. All the sets were broken apart and the pieces were put into bins. We, my kids and I, wanted to put these sets back together so that they could actually play with the toys that the Lego sets created.

Putting the sets together is a slow process. We started out by dumping all the pieces on the table. Since we were spending so much time looking for individual pieces we decided that we needed to try to sort some of the pieces.

The kids weren't all that enthused about trying to put the sets together so I put them on the task of sorting the Lego pieces by color. This proved to be the most important part in getting these sets back together.

We used the bins and the lids to sort the colors and to keep the pieces from spilling onto the floor. The big pieces ended up in a separate pile. We also have Legos that are not part of any set. We were able to identify some of these pieces and set them aside.

The most difficult pieces to sort were the different shades of gray pieces. In order to find the piece I was looking for, I needed to determine which shade of gray it actually was according the assembly book. Once the shade was determined the Lego assembly went quickly.

Some of the Lego pieces were still together, especially the frames of the airplane, helicopter, and imperial walker. These frames are held together by pins and didn't come apart when the rest of the toy fell apart. We sorted these separately also but it was difficult to find them when I was looking for it one piece at a time according to the assembly directions. I had to look ahead in the book in order to see what exactly I was building.

The small studs, lights, and all those other annoying tiny Lego pieces were the hardest to find. The kids sorted these also but not by color, just by size. Having all the small pieces in one place helped in finding the one we needed.

Sorting the Lego pieces was time consuming but it was well worth the effort. This one step saved us hours on our Lego reconstruction. Total time for the complete Lego reconstruction was six hours over two days.